late as 500 B.C. Some consider him to have been the founder of a dynasty; others
invest him with a supernatural personality. But at the best he remains nominis
umbra; as indistinct and shadowy, as in his teaching he is cold and clear. Of the
authenticity of his writings the principal proofs are those derivable from the
writings themselves. But if we allow that such proofs are admissible, what shall
we say of those to be found in the Gospels and Epistles? As their morality is so
much more elevated than that of the Zendavesta, so is the certainty of their
Divine origin infinitely more assured. The class of testimony which asserts the
authenticity of the one not less convincingly affirms the genuineness of the
other. And if the Gospels are all that they purport to be, how can we avoid the
conclusion that they are truthful also in the witness they bear to the life and
character of CHRIST?
We may point to a remarkable contrast between Magianism and Christianity,—
that the former has undergone an almost complete revolution of meaning and
doctrine, while, in spite of sectarian glosses, the latter remains virtually
unaltered. The faith once for all delivered to the saints is held by believers to-day
in all its original purity. We repeat the Creed just as it fell from the rapt lips of
martyrs, saints and confessors. But the monotheism of Zarathustra has been
broken up into a curious Dualism; and upon the religious system of the Gâthas
has been accumulated such a burden of ritual, of novel teaching, of borrowed
dogmas, and alien mysteries, that the acutest students are almost baffled in their
endeavours to distinguish the false from the true, and the new from the old. It is
almost impossible to determine what belongs to the Zarathustrian original, and
what to perversions or adaptations from the Jewish Scriptures.
It is an indisputable testimony to the living force and divine genius of
Christianity, that it occupies a void which no one of the primitive religions has
ever been able to fill. We find it difficult to conceive that any man who has once
been a Christian could voluntarily embrace Zarathustrianism or Buddhism, and
attempt to satisfy his soul with it, any more than with the philosophy of the
Stoics. We are tempted to ask, indeed, whether either could at any time have
satisfied the cravings of humanity. We know that all their ethical schemes could
not lift the sages of Greece and Rome out of the deep, the intense sadness which
possessed them, nor respond to their yearnings after a something they could
neither describe nor define. Their state of thought and feeling has been expressed
by a modern poet, Matthew Arnold, with what seems to us a wonderful fidelity:
—
“Nor only in the intent