Page:Calvinism, an address delivered at St. Andrew's, March 17, 1871.djvu/35

 service of the gods, and the holiest ceremonies were inoculated with impurity and sensuality.

The seventh century before the Christian era was distinguished over the whole East by extraordinary religious revolutions. With the most remarkable of these, that which bears the name of Buddha, I am not here concerned. Buddhism has been the creed for more than two thousand years of half the human race, but it left unaffected our own western world, and therefore I here pass it by.

Simultaneously with Buddha, there appeared another teacher, Zerdusht, or, as the Greeks called him, Zoroaster, among the hardy tribes of the Persian mountains. He taught a creed which, like that of the Israelites, was essentially moral and extremely simple. Nature-worship, as I said, knew nothing of morality. When the objects of natural idolatry became personified, and physical phenomena were metamorphosed into allegorical mythology, the indifference to morality which was obvious in nature became ascribed as a matter of course to gods which were but nature in a personal disguise. Zoroaster, like Moses, saw behind the physical forces into the deeper laws of right and wrong. He supposed himself to discover two antagonist powers contending in the heart of man as well as in the outward universe—a spirit of light and a spirit of darkness, a spirit of truth and a spirit of falsehood, a spirit life-giving and beautiful, a spirit poisonous and deadly. To one or other of these powers man was necessarily in servitude. As the follower of Ormuzd, he became