§ 198. The theoretical education, which was limited to reading, writing, and to instruction, was, in the usages of culture, in the hands of the Magians, the number of whom was estimated at eighty thousand, and who themselves had enjoyed the advantages of a careful education, as is shown by their gradation into Herbeds, Moheds, and Destur-Moheds; i.e. into apprentices, journeymen, and masters. The very fundamental idea of their religion was military; it demanded of men to fight on the side of the king of light, and guard against the prince of darkness and evil. It gave to him thus the honor of a free position between the world-moving powers and the possibility of a self-creative destiny, by which means vigor and chivalrous feeling were developed. Religion trained the activity of man into actualization on this planet, increasing by its means the dominion of the good, by purifying the water, by planting trees, by extirpating troublesome wild beasts. Thus it increased bodily comfort, and no longer, like the monk, treated this as a mere negative. II. _Priestly Education._ § 199. War has in death its force. It produces this, and by its means decides who shall serve and who obey. But the nation that finds its activity in war, though it makes death its absolute means, yet finds its own limit in death. Other nations are only its boundaries, which it can overpass in fighting with and conquering them. But death itself it can never escape, whether it come in the sands of the desert——which buried for Cambyses an army which he sent to the oracle of the Libyan Ammon——or in the sea, that scorns the rod of the angry despot, or by the sword of the freeman who guards his household gods. On this account, that people stands higher that in the midst of life reflects on death, or rather lives for it. The education of such a nation must be priestly because death is the means of the transition to the future life, and consequently equivalent to a new birth, and becomes a religious act. Neither the family-state, nor the caste-state, nor the monkish nor military-state, are hierarchies in the sense that the leading of the national life by a priesthood produces. But in Egypt this was actually the case, because the chief educational tribunal was the death-court which concerned only the dead, in awarding to them or denying them the honor of burial as the result of their whole life, but in its award affected also the honor of the surviving family.