Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/116

Rh species. She breeds plagues and pestilences and looses death to hold its carnival. Leprosy distorts the countenances of hundreds of thousands of men and women, renders loathsome their touch, and encrusts their bodies with plague spots of disease more horrible than death.

The greater enemy of men than elements and animals, however, is man himself. The human scourges of God, like or  or  or, sweep over populated areas like blighting winds and leave an appalling wake of desolation and death. Peoples give distressing exhibition of human bestiality when they go to war with one another. Man's baseness augments a thousandfold the beastliness of nature. His inhumanity to man, nurtured upon his falsehood and inequity, arrogance and avarice, wrath and jealousy, envy and hatred, cunning and intrigue, vindictiveness and cruelty, malice and back-biting, selfishness and meanness, and vice and wickedness create human misery worse than the worst done by the lifeless and living creation whose lord he claims to be. When the brute in him rears his head and acts through him, he becomes worse than the wildest beast of the jungle.

Zarathushtra stigmatizes evil as evil. The existence of so much evil in the world lies heavy on the heart of man. Evil is a challenge, and Zarathushtra accepts it. He does not palliate evil. It is not, he teaches, the passive negation of good. It is the active enemy of good. It is not complementary to good, nor is it good in the making. It is not evil only in name. Evil is just evil, nothing more nor less. It is the fundamental fact of life, and haunts us like our shadows which we cannot evade. Illusion does not cause evil; it exists in the realm of reality. It is the most disagreeable fact in Ahura Mazda's universe, and the prophet of Iran looks it in the face. It is futile to speak of things as better than they actually are. Bad things of life do not lose their badness by giving them good names. It is wrong to makebelieve that evil does not exist, though it does exist as truly as man exists. The world is not all good; it is not all bad either. Neither is all right with the world, nor is all bad with it.

Life is co-operation with good and conflict with evil. Good and evil are co-existing polarities. Man can think of things only in terms of their opposites. Light is light because of darkness. Health is a coveted boon, as its loss heralds sickness. Life is