The “Khordah Avesta” contains this counsel or good wish: “Be cheerful; live thy life the whole time which thou wilt live.” Man is not asked to do the impossible or even the difficult: he is asked to _enjoy_. To the extreme spirituality which shrank from making even a mental image of God is joined a “this worldliness” which saw in rational enjoyment a religious duty. Instead of choosing poverty, man was ordered to make good use of wealth; instead of mortifying the flesh, he was to avoid calumny, evil-speaking, quarrels, to give clothes to the poor, to pray not only for himself but for others. If he does wrong, let him repent honestly in his heart and do some practical good work as a pledge of his repentance. The soul which grieves for its wrongdoing and sins no more comes back into the light of “God the giver, Forgiver, rich in Love, who always is, always was, always will be!” When it was asked, “What is in the first place most acceptable to this earth?” the answer came: “When a holy man walks on it, O Zarathustra!” Good men work _with_ God, who, sure of ultimate triumph, is yet Himself struggling now against the Power of Darkness. There is no religion without a good life: “All have not the Faith who do not hear it; all hear it not who are unclean; all are unclean who are sinners.” God did not send calamities to His servants, but He compassionates them in their trials: “The voice of him weeping, however low, mounts up to the star-lights, comes round the whole world.” It is no sin to desire riches: “Thy kingdom come, O Ahura, when the virtuous poor shall inherit the earth.” In spite of the sufferings of good people, even on this fair earth there is more of pleasantness for the good than for the wicked, and in the next world there is bliss eternal. I do not think that Robert Browning studied the Avesta, but to the thoroughly Zoroastrian line quoted above I am tempted to add this other which is not less so:— “Never dreamed, though right were worsted, wrong would triumph.” For the individual, as for the universe, Right must triumph. If the prophet of optimism has a harder task than the oracle of despair, it is, perhaps, a more profitable task.