Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/118

Rh godhead. In his fight against evil, he is a co-worker and a fellow-combatant with Ahura Mazda. Men of all times and all places have to fight individually and collectively for the mighty cause. Man has to fight the forces of evil to his last breath. His life is one of a continued crusade against the powers of wickedness. He has to adjust social wrongs, regenerate society, and redeem the world of humanity.

Man's duty to resist evil in his own nature. Man was animal but yesterday. Today he is man, though not devoid of animal traits. His destiny is to be angel, and tomorrow he shall be that also. Everyone has in his or her power to be a saint. But the way to attain sainthood and divinity is distant and beset with countless difficulties. Every step in advance is a struggle. The animal in man is obdurate and persistent, cunning and resourceful. To escape from his grip, to destroy his power, to eliminate him, man has to fight a hundred battles. Man's inner life is a perpetual warfare between animal and human within his breast. A violent struggle is going on in every human heart between the higher impulses to renounce animal appetites, and the lower instincts to satisfy them. Man is a divided self, divided mind, divided will, and feels within him the conflict of two opposing natures. The one half of man's being is always at war with his other half. When the Good Spirit first met the Evil Spirit, he said that he was opposed to him in his thoughts and words and deeds and faith and conscience and soul and everything. The same complete polarity obtains between the higher self and the lower self in man. The one stands for truth, virtue, and righteousness, the other represents falsehood, vice, and wickedness. Though inhabitants of the same tenement, they are poles apart in their thoughts, words, deeds, feelings, and aspirations. What is light to one is darkness to the other, and what is nourishment to the one is poison to the other. When the animal in man gets the better of the human, it makes for his imperfection, it is his curse, his enemy, his evil. Evil thoughts and dark passions are its emissaries. They are to be combated and conquered, if man desires to fulfil his destiny. The storm of evil that arises within man is no less violent than any which he encounters in the outer world. Resistance to evil in the one is as instinctive as it is in the other. This resistance is conducive to