“I will love him, Since from my father he gained me. For the master and toilers, And for the lord-kinsman, He, the Good Mind’s bright blessing. The pure to the pure ones. And to me be the insight which I gain from his counsel. Mazda grant it for good conscience forever.” Priestly master of the feast: “Monitions for the marrying, I speak to you, maidens, And heed ye my saying: By these laws of the faith which I utter Obtain ye the life of the good mind On earth and in heaven. And to you, bride and bridegroom, Let each one the other in righteousness cherish, Thus alone unto each shall the home life be happy. Thus real are these things, ye men and ye women From the lie-demon protecting A guard o’er my faithful And so I grant progress and goodness And the hate of the lie with the hate of her bondsmen I would expel from the body— Where is then the righteous lord that will smite them from life And beguile them of license? Mazda! there is the power which will banish and conquer.”[177] THE YASNA. The word Yasna means worship including sacrifice. This was the principal liturgy of the Zarathuśtrians, in which confession, invocation, prayer, exhortation and praise are all combined. The Gāthas are sung in the middle of it and in the Vendīdad Sadah; the Visparad is interpolated within it. Like other compositions of its kind, it is largely made up of the fragments of different ages and modes of composition. We have no reason to suppose that the Yasna existed in its present form in the earlier periods of Zarathuśtranism, but the fragments of which it is composed, may, some of them, reach back to that era, and even its present arrangement is comparatively early in the history of Mazdean literature. The following extracts have been chosen as representing the finest specimens of poetic fervor to be found in the Yasna: COMMENCEMENT OF THE SACRIFICE. “I will announce and I will complete my Yasna to Ahūra Mazda, The radiant and glorious, the greatest and best, The one whose body is the most perfect, Who has fashioned us, And who has nourished and protected us, Who is the most bounteous spirit.... “I will announce and I will complete my Yasna to the Good Mind, And to Righteousness the best, To the Universal Weal and Immortality, To the body of the Kine and to the Kine’s soul, And to the fire of Ahūra Mazda, Who, more than all the Bountiful Immortals Has made the effort for our success.... “I will announce and I will complete my Yasna to Mithra of the wide pastures, Of the thousand ears, and of the myriad eyes The Izad of the spoken name.[178] “I celebrate and complete my Yasna to the Fravishas[179] of the saints, And to those women who have many sons,