I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil: I the Lord do all these things." These words, directed to Cyrus, king of Persia, must be understood as spoken in reference to the Persian sect of the Magians, who then held light and darkness, or good and evil, to be the supreme beings, without acknowledging the great God who is superior to both. To avoid making God the author of evil, Zoroaster's doctrine was, that God originally and directly created only light or good, and that darkness, or evil, followed it by consequence, as the shadow doth the person; that light or good had only a real production from God, and the other afterward resulted from it as the defect thereof. In sum, his doctrine as to this particular was, that there was one Supreme Being, independent and self-existent from all eternity. That under him were two angels, one the angel of light, who is the author and director of all good; and the other the angel of darkness, who is the author and director of all evil; and that these two, out of the mixture of light and darkness, made all things that are; that they are in a perpetual struggle with each other; and that when the angel of light prevails, then the most {60} is good, and when the angel of darkness prevails, then the most is evil; that this struggle shall continue to the end of the world; that then there shall be a general resurrection, and a day of judgment, wherein just retribution shall be rendered to all according to their works, &c. And all this the remainder of that sect, which is _now_ in Persia and India do, without any variation, after so many ages still hold, even to this day. Another reformation which he made in the Magian religion was, that he caused fire temples to be built wherever he came: this being to prevent their sacred fires, on the tops of hills, from being put out by storms, and that the public offices of their religion might be the better performed before the people. Zoroaster pretended he was taken up into heaven, there to be instructed in those doctrines which he was to deliver unto men. Mohammed pretended to have seen God. Zoroaster was too well informed for such imposture. He only claimed to have heard him speaking to him out of the midst of a great and most bright flame of fire; and he, therefore, taught his followers that fire was the truest _shechinah_ of the divine presence. His followers thereafter worshipped the sun as the most perfect fire of God. But this was an original usage of the Magi (referred to in Ezekiel viii. 16), where it is related, that the prophet being carried in a vision to Jerusalem, had there shown him "about five-and-twenty men standing between the porch and the altar, with {61} their backs toward the temple of the Lord, and their faces toward the east; and they worshipped the sun." The meaning of which is, that they had turned their backs upon the true worship of God, and had gone