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Rh probable that it was through him that Cyrus was prompted to restore our people to our holy land again. The edict was issued in the first year of his reign, immediately after the capture of Babylon, which Daniel had foretold by interpreting the writing on the wall.

"But the restoration of our nation, an event so wonderful and strange in the history of the world, though properly attributed to the providence of God, was brought about by means more circuitous than is generally supposed. Fifty or a hundred thousand Jews did not live in Babylonia, Media, and Persia seventy years — making such a singularly religious impression — for nothing. Our people appear to have been treated with much more respect among these oriental nations than in the western world. The reason of this, probably, was that the Persians, like the Arabians, their neighbors, had not forsaken the patriarchal religion or sunk into such gross and degrading idolatry as those nations which had wandered farthest from the paternal hearthstone of the human race.

It is in this period of our nation's sojourn in the East that the famous reformer, Zoroaster, appeared. I look upon him as the second Moses, though without inspiration; but, availing himself of the light of the true revelation, he attempted not to introduce a new religion, but to refine, purify, and build up the religion of his country by introducing into it the most important principles of the true faith, and thus, with a mixture of base and noble motives, to benefit his country,