to show that the worship of Agni rose into fervour after the separation of the Aryan folk. We postpone to the next chapter the mention of the gods of the under-world. * * * * * [Sidenote: The Zend religion.] The religions of which we have been giving this slight sketch have been what we may call ‘natural’ religions, that is to say, the thoughts about God and the Unseen world which without help of any special _vision_ seem to spring up simultaneously in the minds of the different Aryan peoples. But one among the Aryan religions still in pre-historic times broke off abruptly from its relation with the others, and, under a teacher whom we may fairly call god-taught, in beauty and moral purity passed far beyond the rest. This was the Zoroastrian, the faith of the Iranian (ancient Persian) branch, or, as it is perhaps better called, the Zend or Mazdean religion; a creed which holds a pre-eminence among all the religions of antiquity, excepting alone that of the Hebrews. And that there is no exaggeration in such a claim is sufficiently witnessed by the inspired writings themselves, in which the Persian kings are frequently spoken of as if they as much as the Hebrews were worshippers of Jehovah. ‘Cyrus the servant of God,’ ‘The Lord said unto my lord (Cyrus),’ are constantly recurring expressions in Isaiah. In some respects this Zoroastrianism seems to stand in violent opposition to the Aryan religion. Nevertheless, at the back of the religion of the Zend Avesta, which is the sacred book of the Iranian creed, we can (as was before hinted) trace the outline of an earlier natural religion essentially the same--so far as we can judge--with the religion of the Vedas. And upon the whole we should be disposed to say that Zoroastrianism appears to be not much else than a higher development of that earlier system. At any rate, we may feel sure that the older system was before the coming of the ‘gold bright’[88] reformer, essentially a polytheism with only some yearnings towards monotheism, and that Zoroaster settled it upon a firmly monotheistic basis. This very fact leaves us little to say about the Iranian system considered strictly as a religion. For when once nations have risen to the height of a monotheism there can be little essential difference in their beliefs; such difference as there is will be in the conception they have of the character of their gods, whether it be a high, a relatively high, or relatively low one; and this again is more perhaps a question of moral development than of religion. Their one god, since he made all things and rules all things, cannot partake of the exclusive nature of any natural phenomenon; he cannot be a god of wind or water, of sun or sky. The Zoroastrian creed did afterwards introduce (then for the first time in the world’s history) a very important element of belief, namely, of the distinct origin, and almost if not quite equal powers, of the good and evil principles.