There they throve and there they live still,
while the ranks of their co-religionists in Persia are daily thinning
and dwindling away.[9]
As the Parsis are the ruins of a people, so are their sacred books the
ruins of a religion. There has been no other great belief in the world
that ever left such poor and meagre monuments of its past splendor. Yet
great is the value which that small book, the "Avesta," and the belief
of that scanty people, the Parsis, have in the eyes of the historian and
theologian, as they present to us the last reflex of the ideas which
prevailed in Iran during the five centuries which preceded and the seven
which followed the birth of Christ, a period which gave to the world the
Gospels, the Talmud, and the Qur'an. Persia, it is known, had much
influence on each of the movements which produced, or proceeded from,
those three books; she lent much to the first heresiarchs, much to the
Rabbis, much to Mohammed. By help of the Parsi religion and the
"Avesta," we are enabled to go back to the very heart of that most
momentous period in the history of religious thought, which saw the
blending of the Aryan mind with the Semitic, and thus opened the second
stage of Aryan thought.
Inquiries into the religion of ancient Persia began long ago, and it was
the old enemy of Persia, the Greek, who first studied it. Aristotle,
Hermippus, and many others wrote of it in books of which, unfortunately,
nothing more than a few fragments or merely the titles have come down to
us.
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