clearly than any other record the spiritual concept of the pure heart emerging from the ritualistic idea; while it is often hard in any particular text to distinguish between the lower and the higher significance. When God speaks to the prophet thus--“Purity {130} is for man, next to life, the highest good: that purity, O Zarathustra, that is in the religion of Mazda for him who cleanses himself with good thoughts, words, and deeds,”[130.1] we believe we have reached a high ethical conception; but the phrase is supposed by Darmesteter to refer to him who cleanses himself according to the prescriptions of the law. Yet in their cathartic code were the germs of an advanced morality, and truthfulness and chastity were fostered by it.[130.2] The lustrations were partly of the primitive type, taken over, as usual, from a lower stratum of religion; their most interesting features are the cleansing words that accompanied them, which were not usually prayers but spells, formulæ of magic potency, but drawn from a high {131} religion, such as these, for instance:--“The will of the Lord is the Law of Righteousness”; “Holiness is the best of all Good: it is also Happiness.”[131.1] Even the virtue of philanthropy is given cathartic value in a spell-formula, “he who relieves the poor makes Ahura King,” recited before the person was washed with the holy water of Mazda and the “gômêz” of an ox.[131.2] In a certain sense the Mazdean religion has been the “purest” the world has known; but the high spiritual concept of purity that it evolved never escaped nor struggled to escape, as did the Judaic and Hellenic, from the bondage to ritual. Therefore the religion was doomed to ceremoniousness and sacerdotalism; and the modern student who is fascinated with its frequent outbursts of genius and its deep, whole-hearted conviction must be prepared for the inevitable bathos that awaits him. Its remoteness from the modern and civilised view of things may be estimated from {132} the Zarathustrian text, in which the prophet exalts the priestly medicine-man who heals the diseased limb with a cleansing spell and by the ejection of the demon, above the surgeon who heals it with a knife.[132.1]