transmitted from preceding ages, there is, underlying all phenomena however mixed and manifold they seem, a fundamental unity of which the common name is Tae-keih, the absolute, or literally the 'Great Extreme.' . . . From it alone, as from the fountain-head of being, issued everything that is. 'Creation' is the periodic flowing forth of it. . . . 'All things in the world,' says Choo-he, 'seem as to their primary tendencies to issue from the One,'" &c.1

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Looking to the first great book of the Aryan nations, we learn, through Mr. Max Müller, that "the consciousness that all the deities are but different names of one and the same godhead, breaks forth indeed here and there in the Veda. . . . One poet, for instance, says (in the RigVeda), They call him Indra, Mitra, Varuna, Agni; then he is in the beautiful-winged heavenly Garutmat: that which is one the wise call it in divers manners,' &c.2 There are many verses in the Rig-Veda to the same effect. Take, for instance, "In the beginning there arose the Golden Child. . . . He established the earth and the sky.

Who is the God to whom we shall offer our sacrifice ? He who through His power is the one king of the breathing and awakening world; He who governs all, man and beast, &c. May He not destroy us, He the creator of the earth; or He the righteous who created the heaven; He also created the bright and mighty waters," &c. The name the ancient Aryan gave to this mysterious power is Bráhman; "for bráhman meant originally force, will, wish, and the propulsive power of creation."

Colebrooke, speaking of the Veda, says, "The real doctrine of the Indian Scripture is the unity of the Deity, in whom the universe is comprehended; and the seeming polytheism which it exhibits offers the elements and the stars and the planets as gods. . . . But the worship of deified heroes is no part of the system; nor are the incarnations of deities suggested in any portion of the text which I have yet seen, though such are sometimes hinted 1 Ubi supra, p. 300.

2 Lecture on the Vedas.

at by commentators." 1 Again in his Essays (vol. i. p. 25), "The deities invoked appear, on a cursory inspection of the Veda, to be as various as the authors of the prayers addressed to them; but, according to the most ancient annotations of the Indian Scripture, those numerous names of persons and things are all resolvable into different titles of three deities, and ultimately of one God."

The Puranas are works of much later date than the Vedas, although the cosmogony and mythology are essentially the same in both. But to whatever age they may be assigned, they belong to an antiquity which was already vastly remote before the beginning of the Christian era. In the first book of the Vishnu Purânas, as translated from the original Sanskrit by Wilson, it is written: “Brahmá, Vishnu, and Siva are the most powerful energies of God; next to these are the inferior deities," &c. It must be understood, however, that God is here identified with nature. "All kinds of substance, with or without shape, here or elsewhere, are the body of Vishnu." 2

Of ancient religions no one more nearly concerns us than Zoroastrianism. In its present form it is the religion of the Parsees. But its interest to us lies in its originally pure monotheism, in its great antiquity, and in its relation to our Bible. I had better say at once, the whole subject is as yet obscured by impenetrable ignorance. When we are told that fifty years ago the sacred books of the Buddhists, Brahmans, and Zoroastrians were all but unknown, and that there was not a single scholar who could have translated a line of the Veda, a line of the Zend-Avesta, or a line of the Buddhist Tripitaka; when we further reflect that the cuneiform character and Achæmenian inscriptions have been rendered intelligible within our own recollection only, it will easily be understood what little progress can yet have been made, and how uncertain our footing still must be. We are, notwithstanding, in possession of some positive knowledge; and what we do 1 Asiatic Researches, vol. viii. p. 473. 2 Chap. xxii.

know touches the old standpoints of theology to the quick.

It is not easy to winnow the grain from the husk of conjecture. The student is bewildered with masses of crude material, and with the diversity of opinion with which this is presented to him. All I shall attempt is to indicate a few of the best sources of enlightenment for those who are quite in the dark; and to save them time and trouble by extricating from the entanglement such facts and judgments as shall be least likely to mislead. The points we have to think of are: 1. Who was Zoroaster; where did he come from; what was his date? 2. What did he teach? Before offering any surmises in reply, it will serve our purpose to glance at the origin of the Aryan people, with whom the whole of this subject is bound up.

If you turn to the map of Asia in any school atlas, and look at what is there marked Tartary, you will find the great river Amoo or Oxus taking its rise at the foot of the Hindu Kush mountains, which form the boundary between Caubul and Bokharia. A little farther to the north-east, you will see another river marked the Sihon; this is the Jaxartes of the ancients, which rises in the range separating Turkestan from Little Thibet, or the westernmost point of the Chinese Empire. The primitive land of the Aryans is said to lie somewhere between these two rivers. Owing, as it would seem, to great changes of climate brought about by physical convulsions (the grounds for the supposition are given below), the inhabitants of this "Land of Pleasantness," as the Iranians called it, migrated first (so it is supposed, though where nearly all is supposition we need not repeat the caution) towards Europe; which they entered, some possibly by passing north of the Caspian, others by way of the Hellespont. These were the progenitors of the Slavic, Celtic, and Germanic races: these, as their language proves beyond a doubt, were the ancestors alike of ancient Greeks and of modern Irishmen :

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and through these, all Europeans, save the Laplanders, the Turks, and the Hungarians, are equally related to the Hindus. Long after the various migrations to the northwest, the original stem, or what remained of it, left their primeval home; and striking southwards, crossed the Himalaya and Afghan ranges, and took possession of the Punjab. "At the first dawn of traditional history we see the Aryan tribes migrating across the snow of the Himalaya southward towards the 'Seven Rivers' [the Indus, the five rivers of the Punjâb, and the Sarasvati], and ever since, India has been called their home." "Before this time they had been living in more northern regions within the same precincts with the ancestors of the Greeks," &c.1

The Medes and Persians of old were part of the Aryan stock. The name "Iran," by which Persians now call their country, is no other than the Vaidic Airyana, or home of the Aryans. The land of the Iranians, in one sense, formerly extended from the Indus to the Tigris, from the Oxus and Jaxartes to the Persian Gulf; but the true Iranthe old Airyana Vaêga-is limited by most modern writers either to the plateau of Pamir, which is in the neighbourhood of Samarcand, and formed part of the ancient Sogdiana; or to the region a little south-west of this, once called Bactria, which is held to be the same as the Balkh of the present time. Some authorities, and these amongst the highest, maintain that Airyana Vaêga was in Armenia, somewhere in the neighbourhood of Ararat. But to this we shall return presently.

It was incidentally remarked that the comparison of languages proved descent from a common stock. It is by such means alone that we are enabled to read with clearness a history that never was written. So far as it goes, the linguistic evidence is conclusive. When we find that "father" is athair in Irish, fadar in Gothic, pater in Latin, Taτýρ in Greek, patar in Zend, and pitar in Sanskrit; and learn that, the Sanskrit root Pa means "to protect," the 1 Bunsen's Outlines of the Philosophy of History, p. 129.

genetic relationship is too manifest for doubt. Also "among the Aryans, matar had the meaning of 'maker,' from Ma, 'to fashion." Thus our earliest prattlings discover the consanguinity never till now suspected. Other family titles tell the same tale. "Brother' is bhrater in Sanskrit, brâtar in Zend, and so on till we come to brathair in Irish. Also we are taught the pretty meaning of our English daughter;' duhitar is the Sanskrit; and duhitar, as Professor Lassen was the first to show, is derived from duh, a root which in Sanskrit means 'to milk,' connected perhaps with the Latin duco, and also, maybe, with the French traire." "The name of milkmaid," says Professor Müller, "given to the daughter of the house, opens before our eyes a little idyll of the poetical and pastoral life of the early Aryans."

The southern and eastern migration of our Japhetic ancestors is fortunately not altogether untold. In the Vendidad-the religious code of the Parsees-we have a record of the exodus and wanderings of the last of the Aryans who left their northern home. According to Dr. Spiegel, the oldest part of the Zend-Avesta is the Yasna; the second the Vendidad. This work gives us the dispersion of the Aryans, their theology, and their philosophy, together with the most ancient traditions of the race. The Vendidad stands in the same relation to the descendants of Japhet, as the book of Genesis does to those of Shem and Ham. For historical purposes the first is fully as trustworthy and hence as valuable as the last. It introduces to us a monotheism which, at its fountainhead, was at least as pure as that of Abram and Melchizedek. What the relative antiquity of the two systems may be, we have but slender means of knowing. Of this you will better judge when we are farther advanced.

Allusion was made just now to changes of climate as probable causes of the great dispersion. In the first Fargard, or chapter, of the Vendidad, we are told that Angro Mainyus [Ahriman] converted the "Land of Bless

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