He was able to show this kindness and consideration for the religion of other peoples, because his own religion and that of his Persians was a very enlightened one. I think we shall not do wrong in calling it the {114} most enlightened religion of all that we find before Christ came. It was the religion called Zoroastrianism, from the name of its founder, Zoroaster, who is also called Zarathustra. It was the religion of those Indo-European people of whom we have seen one part pressing down south into India and another part pressing westward. Zoroaster is thought to have been the author of the most ancient portions of what is called the Zend-Avesta, which means the Avesta, or Sacred Writings, written in the language of Zend. Zend belongs to the Aryan group of the Indo-European family of languages, from another branch of which our own native English language has been derived. [Sidenote: Zoroaster] Zoroaster taught that there is one great and good god, Ormuzd, but that there is also another supernatural being, Ahriman, the spirit of evil. It is accordingly as men do the will of Ormuzd, that is to say, do good acts, that they will have a happy life after death. If the good acts a man has done in life here are more in number and importance than his bad acts he will go to paradise; if the bad acts are more than the good he will go to hell and suffer everlasting punishment. Justice, acting justly, was what Zoroaster recognised as the most important thing of all. You will see at once how near this very ancient belief comes to that which we hold now, and how much more enlightened it is than other religions which we have noticed. It contains the idea of one god supreme over all the universe--not only supreme for a single nation or for one portion of the earth. Fire, that mysterious, useful, kindly thing by which man warms himself, by which he cooks his food, and which, nevertheless, is capable of such horrible destruction, seems to have been associated closely with the {115} power of the good god, Ormuzd. Fire was therefore a sacred element. The cow, another kindly thing, because of its use to man, was also sacred. In the religion which Zoroaster was brought up in the cow had been sacrificed to ward off evils--with the idea, already noticed, that the more precious to man the thing that he sacrificed, the more favour his sacrifice would win with the gods. Zoroaster taught that it was impious to kill the cow. It was with this fine and enlightened religion in their hearts, then, that Cyrus and his Persians came conquering the western world. They conquered, but they treated those that they conquered with justice, according to the great teaching of Zoroaster. As they believed in one god over all the earth, they might permit the worship of that god to be carried on according to the various customs that they found where they went, so long as those customs were not altogether base and evil.