We see, then, that here, as elsewhere, the superiority of Christianity is to be found in its quantity, in its fulness of life. It touches Buddhism at all its good points, in all its truths. It accepts the Buddhistic doctrine of rewards and punishments, of law, progress, self-denial, self-control, humanity, charity, equality of man with man, and pity for human sorrow; but to all this it adds--how much more! It fills up the dreary void of Buddhism with a living God; with a life of God in man's soul, a heaven here as well as hereafter. It gives us, in addition to the struggle of the soul to find God, a God coming down to find the soul. It gives a divine as real as the human, an infinite as solid as the finite. And this it does, not by a system of thought, but by a fountain and stream of life. If all Christian works, the New Testament included, were destroyed, we should lose a vast deal no doubt; but we should not lose Christianity; for that is not a book, but a life. Out of that stream of life would be again developed the conception of Christianity, as a thought and a belief. We should be like the people living on the banks of the Nile, ignorant for five thousand years of its sources; not knowing whence its beneficent inundations were derived; not knowing by what miracle its great stream could flow on and on amid the intense heats, where no rain falls, and fed during a course of twelve hundred miles by no single affluent, yet not absorbed in the sand, nor evaporated by the ever-burning sun. But though ignorant of its source, they know it has a source, and can enjoy all its benefits and blessings. So Christianity is a full river of life, containing truths apparently the most antagonistic, filling the soul and heart of man and the social state of nations with its impulses and its ideas. We should lose much in losing our positive knowledge of its history; but if all the books were gone, the tablets of the human heart would remain, and on these would be written the everlasting Gospel of Jesus, in living letters which no years could efface and no changes conceal. Chapter V. Zoroaster and the Zend Avesta. § 1. Ruins of the Palace of Xerxes at Persepolis. § 2. Greek Accounts of Zoroaster. Plutarch's Description of his Religion. § 3. Anquetil du Perron and his Discovery of the Zend Avesta. § 4. Epoch of Zoroaster. What do we know of him? § 5. Spirit of Zoroaster and of his Religion. § 6. Character of the Zend Avesta. § 7. Later Development of the System in the Bundehesch. § 8. Relation of the Religion of the Zend Avesta to that of the Vedas. § 9. Is Monotheism or pure Dualism the Doctrine taught in the Zend Avesta? § 10. Relation of this System to Christianity. The Kingdom of Heaven. § 1. Ruins of the Palace of Xerxes at Persepolis.