Page:History of Zoroastrianism.djvu/56

Rh with him on his side, Zarathushtra felt that he was not alone in his loneliness. His prestige, however, is shattered and all restraint is broken. Respect for him is gone. He is now greeted everywhere with hostile feelings and coarse jokes. The mob that was hilarious in his commendation becomes furious in his condemnation. It mocks and maligns, jeers and insults him.

God fashions religion as an ideal aiming at cohesiveness, brotherhood, and unity among mankind. Man makes it disturbing, disruptive, and divisive. The great ideal recedes from the very inception of religion, until it grows dim and distant. It does not die, because ideals are immortal. Hope, ingrained in human heart, holds out the eternal assurance of its eventual realization.

Friendless and forlorn, Zarathushtra flees to Ahura Mazda. He implores him, he cries unto him to help him as a friend would help his friend. He has no following, no means of sustenance, and no place of refuge. If he wants to live so that he can yet hope to work as the prophet of Mazda and found his excellent religion, he should leave his homeland. He asks Mazda to point him the land to which he should flee. When all hopes seem to be blighted, he bids farewell with heavy heart to the place of his birth. He does not know to what land he should turn and he turns to wherever Mazda may take him. He walks and walking thinks, dreams, falls into a reverie, stops, wakes up, hastens his steps. He comes across villages, but rumours have preceded him that a man, a pretender, a blasphemer, a disturber of peace is on the way. No headsman of the villages comes forward to offer him an asylum in his village, even though the traditional usage of hospitality demands that his doors be flung open to the weary traveller. He must go onward, he sees, and travels to places farther removed from his native town, so that the people may not know him. There, among new surroundings and new people, he must begin his work anew. In his own town they knew him from childhood. They could not realize that they had among them one who had risen through the incomparable virtues of his head and heart to perfection, and upon whom Ahura Mazda's grace had descended. They could not reconcile themselves to the idea that they should bend their heads and bow their knees to one who grew of age among them and whose father and father's