ized nations. There is, however, no other
evidence, besides this, that divorce was very common where the Magian
system prevailed; and the mere assertion of the writer who personated
Xanthus Lydus will scarcely justify us in affixing even this stigma on
the religion.

Upon the whole, Magism, though less elevated and less pure than the
old Zoroastrian creed, must be pronounced to have possessed a certain
loftiness and picturesqueness which suited it to become the religion
of a great and splendid monarchy. The mysterious fire-altars on
the mountain-tops, with their prestige of a remote antiquity--the
ever-burning flame believed to have been kindled from on high--the
worship in the open air under the blue canopy of heaven--the long troops
of Magians in their white robes, with their strange caps, and their
mystic wands--the frequent prayers--the abundant sacrifices--the long
incantations--the supposed prophetic powers of the priest-caste--all
this together constituted an imposing whole at once to the eye and to
the mind, and was calculated to give additional grandeur to the civil
system that should be allied with it. Pure Zoroastrianism was too
spiritual to coalesce readily with Oriental luxury and magnificence,
or to lend strength to a government based on the ordinary principles of
Asiatic despotism. Magism furnished a hierarchy to support the throne,
and add splendor and dignity to the court, while they overawed the
subject-class by their supposed possession of supernatural powers,
and of the right of mediating between heaven and man. It supplied a
picturesque worship which at once gratified the senses and excited
the fancy It gave scope to man's passion for the marvellous by
its incantations, its divining-rods, its omen-reading, and its
dream-expounding. It gratified the religious scrupulosity which finds
a pleasure in making to itself difficulties, by the disallowance of
a thousand natural acts, and the imposition of numberless rules
for external purity. At the same time it gave no offence to the
anti-idolatrous spirit in which the Arians had hitherto gloried, but
rather encouraged the iconoclasm which they always upheld and practised.
It thus blended easily with the previous creed of the people, awaking no
prejudices, clashing with no interests; winning its way by an apparent
meekness and unpresumingness, while it was quite prepared, when the
fitting time came, to be as fierce and exclusive as if it had never worn
the