§ III.――THE RELIGION OF ZARDUSHT, OR ZOROASTER. All religions are said to have deviated from their primitive simplicity and purity, as men advanced in knowledge and civilisation. This is true but in a restricted and distinctive sense, and may be explained, even without yielding to our habit of considering that which is more remote and less known as holier than that which is nearer and better examined. Thus, we may admit that the impressions made upon men in the first stage of expanding reason are stronger and more vivid, the less they are distracted by simultaneous and correlative associations; one great idea is enough to fill their whole mind, and admits of no rival, of no commixture with any thing else; curiosity, versatility, luxuriancy of intellect are not yet known; constancy is a necessity in a small compass of ideas. We have already touched[97] upon the powerful effect which the early perception of the _Divine_ produced upon man: but he soon circumscribed what was too vast or his comprehension in a perceptible object――heaven, sun, fire, to which he offered his adoration; he wanted a visible type or image of the invisible Divinity; but, his means of formation being at first very confined, he contented himself with the most simple representation: he had a symbol, an idol in a grove or cavern, but not yet a Pantheon. Simplicity may be a mere restriction to one object or to few objects; purity, nothing else but homogeneity in good or bad, true or false; we shall not confound them with rationality, which may subsist with multiplicity and mixture. Thus, the adoration of one deified man, one great serpent, one huge stone, is by no means more rational than the worship of numerous generations of gods, the ingenious personification sof multiform nature, ever acknowledged as the genuine offspring of the happy marriage between intellect and imagination. In the absence of arts and riches, worship is rude and destitute of showy accessories. Afterwards, the development of the understanding widens the field of reasoning, the fertility of which may be attested more by the shoot of weeds than by the growth of fruits: error prevails over truth; the increase of manifold resources facilitates and prompts superfetation of exterior religion. Besides, the impressions, by which the first legislator attached his followers to his doctrine, are effaced by time; the first traditions, obscured, confused, and altered; faith is weakened, and an opening made for change in belief, practice, and morals. A change, merely as such, is considered as a corruption by the adherents of the old creed. Finally, revolutions, interior and exterior, deteriorate or destroy religion and civilisation.