subduing and extirpating evil, is surely a sublime thought and a source of lofty inspiration and encouragement in well-doing, although it has been degraded by Parsi Dasturs--as all grand conceptions and ideals are apt to be under priestly influences--into a ridiculous and childish hatred of snakes, scorpions, frogs, lizards, water-rats, and other animals supposed to have been produced by Angrô-mainyush. Plato held a similar theory of creation, regarding it not as the manifestation of pure benevolence endowed with almighty power, but rather as the expression of perfect goodness working at disadvantage in an intractable material, which by its inherent stubbornness prevented the full embodiment and realization of the original purpose and desire of the Creator or Cosmourgos, who was therefore obliged to content himself with what was, under the circumstances, the only possible, but by no means the best imaginable, world. The Manicheans attributed the same unsatisfactory result to the activity of an evil principle, which thwarted the complete actualization of the designs of the Deity. So conspicuous, indeed, is the defectiveness of nature as a means of promoting the highest conceivable human happiness, so marked and manifold are the causes of suffering in all spheres of sentient existence, and so often do the elements seem to conspire for the destruction of mankind, raging relentlessly like a wild beast “Red in tooth and claw With ravin,” that every cosmogony has been compelled to assume the persistent intervention of some malignant spirit or perverse agency as the only rational explanation of such a condition of things. The orthodox Christianity of to-day gives over the earth entirely to the sovereignty of Satan, the successful usurper of Eden, and instead of bidding the righteous to look forward to the final re-enthronement and absolute supremacy of truth and goodness in this world as the “One far-off divine event, To which the whole creation moves,” consoles them with the vague promise of compensation in a future state of being. Even this remote prospect of redemption is confined to a select few; not only is the earth destined to be burned with fire on account of its utter corruption, but the great majority of its inhabitants are doomed to eternal torments in the abode of evil spirits.