words, and the good deeds which were thought and spoken and done by thee. For when I have become commendable, I am then made altogether more commendable by thee; when I have become precious I am then made altogether still more precious by thee; and when I have become glorious, I am then made altogether still more glorious by thee."

And when he walks onwards from there, a sweet-scented breeze comes then to meet him, which is more fragrant than all perfume. The soul of the righteous inquires of Srôsh thus: "What breeze is this, that never in the world so fragrant a breeze came into contact with me?"

Then Srôsh, the righteous, replies to that righteous soul thus: "This breeze is from heaven, which is so fragrant.”

Afterwards, on his march, the first step is set on the place of good thoughts, the second on that of good words, the third on that of good deeds, and the fourth step reaches up into the endless light which is allradiant. And angels and archangels of every description come to meet him, and ask tidings from him thus: "How hast thou come, from that which is a perishable, fearful, and very miserable existence, to this which is an imperishable existence, that is undisturbed, thou youth who art well thinking, well speaking, well doing, and of good religion ?"

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Then Aûharmazd, the Lord, speaks thus: Ask ye from him no tidings; for he has parted from that which was a precious body, and has come by that which is a fearful road. And bring ye unto him the most agreeable of eatables, that which is the midspring butter, so that he may rest his soul from that bridge of the three nights, unto which he came from Astôvîdâd and the remaining demons; and seat him upon an allembellished throne."

As it is declared that "Unto the righteous man and woman, after passing away, they bring food of the most agreeable of eatables-the food of the angels of the spiritual existences—that which is the midspring butter; and they seat him down upon an all-embellished throne. For ever and everlasting they remain in all glory with the angels of the spiritual existences everlastingly." Sacred Books of the East, vol. XXIV. pp. 18-22. (The meaning of the name of the work from which this extract is taken is Opinions of the Spirit of Wisdom.)

Let us smile, if we will, at the "midspring butter"; but has a religion, however imperfect, existed in vain, which has been able to hand down to all posterity such a picture of the reward of a virtuous soul?

APPENDIX TO CHAPTER IV

ON THE IDENTIFICATION OF VISTÂSPA, THE ROYAL CONVERT OF ZOROASTER, WITH VISTÂSPA THE FATHER OF DARIUS

THIS identification would be impossible if Zoroaster lived, as some of the Greeks thought, 5000 years before the Trojan war. But this curious Greek error has been well explained by Professor Williams Jackson (Zoroaster, p. 152); the Greeks mistook what the Persians told them of the fravashi, or spiritual essence,

of Zoroaster, for a statement regarding his bodily existence. But it is argued, that if Zoroaster had lived in the sixth century B.C., the Greeks must have known his period. This argument would be sound, had Zoroaster been a Persian; but the Persians, though accepting the Magi as their priests, cared little for any individual Magian; hence it was that they did not mention Zoroaster's name to Herodotus.

Modern critics do not realise what a blank void was caused in the historical consciousness of the Magi, by reason of their rebellion against the Persians, and their defeat by Darius. This is why the Avesta never mentions Darius or his successors on the Persian throne. A silence caused by shame has been misinterpreted as if all that preceded this silence were ancient and legendary.

Again, the language of the Gâthas has certain special resemblances to the language of the Rig-Veda, a book probably of the second millennium B.C.; whence it is argued that the Gâthas date not very far from the second millennium B.C. But Professor Moulton tells us (Early Religious Poetry of Persia, p. 4) that these two languages differ in their general character as much as Dutch and English; a difference which must have taken many centuries to accomplish. The special resemblances may be accounted for by the Gâthas having been written in eastern Iran, comparatively near India. I may remark that when so excellent a scholar as E. W. West places the conversion of Vistâspa at the date 618 B.C. (Sacred Books of the East, vol. XLVII. p. xxx), it can hardly, on linguistic grounds, be thought impossible for it to have taken place in 570 B.C.

Lastly, the father of the Zoroastrian Vistâspa is called in the Avesta Aurvat-âspa (Aban Yast, 105); in the Pahlavi writings by the equivalent name Lôhrâsp or Lôharâsp. Now Darius, in the Behistun inscription, after mentioning his own father Vistâspa, says that the father of Vistâspa was Arshâma. Hence it is argued, that the two Vistâspas, having different fathers, must be different men. But (not to speak of other explanations) this argument overlooks the fact that Darius, in tracing his own descent from Achæmenid kings, would almost certainly have omitted females who were in the direct line; see a later instance of this given by West (Sacred Books of the East, vol. v. p. xix). Thus Arshâma, if he were the maternal grandfather of Vishtâspa, would be called his father; and this would take away the difficulty.

The identification of the two Vistâspas receives some support from Pliny; still more from the sober narrative in Dinkard v. i. 2-6; iv. 8, 9, according to which Lôharâsp, the father of the Zoroastrian Vistâspa, went as a subordinate of Nebuchadnezzar to the siege of Jerusalem (the siege in 598 B.C. must be the one intended).

I think, therefore, that the identification stands.

CHAPTER V

ANCIENT RELIGION: CHINA AND JAPAN

So remote, until the latter half of the nineteenth century, were China and Japan from the spiritual movements of Europe and western Asia, that it may seem to some people that this part of the earth ought to be regarded as a separate province, and not to form part of the subject of a work which necessarily centres in the western nations. But the importance of China and Japan, from the moral and religious no less than from the material point of view, is undeniable; and to omit them from the present work would leave a sad lacuna. I must needs take them in; and China, the more ancient, comes first.

The history of China is eloquent to us on the merits, and eloquent on the defects, of reverence when taken as the single supreme motive of man. It is impossible to think of the four thousand and more years during which the Chinese have been a growing and expanding nation, always industrious, always subduing the earth to human needs, never dispirited by calamities whether inflicted by man or by nature, and not to feel that a true power lies in them, of which it will be profitable to investigate the source. But we cannot help also noticing how prone the Chinese have been to cling to ancient evils; how strong the yoke of custom (until quite recent years) has been upon them; and this defect came from a wrongly directed reverence. For good chiefly but not solely, the Chinese type of character has been remarkable; and we cannot but inquire how this is reflected in their religion.

The Chinese character appears to have received its final stamp in the sixth century before Christ, through the great and famous philosopher Confucius; but it cannot be doubted that its main characteristics had appeared long before this. If we go back to the first origin of the race, we have to look to the region south of the Caspian sea. So says Terrien de Lacouperie (as quoted in The Story of the Nations-China, page 2), and doubtless

he is right. Of this conclusion the character of the Chinese writing is evidence. Chinese writing is at this day in that stage which belonged to all writing before an alphabet was invented; a stage when something of the hieroglyphical character still remains; when every sign stands separate from every other sign, and each sign suggests its own meaning, not indeed at a glance, but by a nearer similarity than is possible under alphabetical systems, where the sound of each letter, and not the meaning of each sign, is the guide to the word intended. More than 30,000 signs are employed in Chinese writing; and how remote this system must be from our own western methods of writing will be seen at once. But when we find that one of the languages of the Nineveh inscriptions has no fewer than 642 characters1, we perceive that in that language also what we call an alphabet has hardly been attained; though an alphabet must have been on its way. In Chinese writing an alphabet is not even on its way; yet Terrien de Lacouperie was able to show "a marked connexion between many of the primitive written characters of the languages of Akkadia and China ”— Akkadia meaning the great Mesopotamian valley. We infer, then, that in times antecedent to the earliest of the Akkadian or Sumerian languages as found in the Nineveh inscriptions, the Chinese must have been one of the races inhabiting the country between the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea, including in this the valleys of the Euphrates and the Tigris.

Eastwards, then, from this origin, went the Chinese; but it would be vain to ask in what millennium before Christ this great migration took place. If I understand rightly what others have written on the subject, it is not merely the Chinese writing, but the Chinese spoken language, which has marks of being extremely primitive; and this would imply a very early migration from the haunts of their first habitation, where they were associated with races more given to change than they themselves

were.

As farther linking the Chinese with the Sumerian races, the oblique eyes of some of the latter may be mentioned2.

When the Chinese people are first mentioned in their own historical documents, we find them in the province of Shensi, along the western bank of the great river Hwang-ho, in its upper course. An ancient monarch, named Fû-hsi, is said to have governed them in those early days; but he is too shadowy a

1 Sayce's Archaeology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, p. 18.

2 Noted by Sayce, Archæology of the Cuneiform Inscriptions, p. 72.

figure for serious history to dwell long upon him. The most ancient of Chinese books, the Shû King, begins with a brief account of a ruler of the name of Yâo, in whose time a flood took place, which may probably have resulted from an inundation of the Hwang-ho river, such as has repeatedly happened in more recent times. But the "Canon of Yâo" (by which title this part of the Shû King is known) contains the still more curious information that this ruler appointed astronomers by whom the four quarter-days of the year, the solstices and the equinoxes, were to be exactly determined; the days being fixed by the particular star which then culminated in the south while the sun was setting in the west. As these stars are named in the Shû King, modern astronomers have been able to calculate from them the date at which Yâo must have reigned, and they determine it to have been approximately in the twenty-fourth century before the Christian era. This is fairly in accordance with the traditional reckoning of Chinese philosophers and historians (as will be seen by referring to the third chapter of Dr Legge's Introduction to the Shû King, in the third volume of Sacred Books of the East); and hence we may regard Yâo as a real historical personage, living at about the date thus assigned to him.

If Yâo was a real historical personage, the inference seems to hold that the monarchs subsequent to him who are mentioned in the Shû King were real historical personages also; and as the art of writing is distinctly mentioned as in use at a date not far from 1700 B.C., and is probably implied in regard to a considerably earlier epoch, there is no reason for doubting that the names of the monarchs and some of the principal events of their reigns were actually recorded. In later times we have mention of court annalists or recorders1; but we have no certain knowledge when these officials began to exist; it was at any rate long before the time of Confucius (in the sixth century B.C.). But in reference to the trustworthiness of the Shû King, the opinion of the Chinese philosopher Mencius is important (he lived in the fourth century B.C.); here is what Dr Legge says about this2:

One passage in Mencius seems to put it beyond a doubt that the Shû existed as such a collection in his time. Having said that "it would be better to be without the Shû than to give entire credit to it," he makes immediate reference to one of the books of our classic by name, and adds, "In the Completion of the War I select two or three passages only, and believe them."

1 See pages 4 and 5 of Dr Legge's Introduction to the Shû King just mentioned. 2 In the same Introduction, page 2.

M. D. A.

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