s) of the Lord may hasten to come to him and
strengthen him for his mission.

This poetical rendering of the call of Zarathustra is free both from
miraculous embellishment and from undue exaltation of the person of
the prophet, and forms a great contrast to later statements in the
Avesta, where the prophet is placed in secret conclave with Ahura,
asking him questions and receiving detailed replies which at once
rank as revelation. In the Gathas, allowing for the theological and
poetic form, everything is human and natural. We are strongly
reminded of the accounts of the calls of prophets in the Old
Testament--there is the same choice by the deity of an apparently
weak instrument to accomplish a work urgently called for by the
times, the same sense of insufficiency on the part of the prophet,
but the same absolute confidence on his part in the power of the
deity, and hence the same absolute assurance, once the mission is
accepted, that the cause which he has been called to carry forward
must succeed. In many of the following Gathas the same parallel is
strongly impressed on the mind of the reader. The sense of weakness
is expressed again and again--the prophet has no victorious career,
but is exposed to much gainsaying, which he feels acutely. Yet he
never doubts that his god is with him, and is working for him. To him
he commits his doubts and fears, of his goodness he is joyfully
assured, and his aid he expects with confidence. He is entirely
devoted to Ahura and his cause, and offers himself up with his whole
powers to work out the divine will. He will teach, he says, as long
as he is able, till he has brought all the living to believe. He is
conscious of a divine power working in him. Nothing in himself, he is
strong by the divine grace which Ahura sends him: his words have
efficacy to keep the fiends at a distance, and to advance in men's
minds the divine kingdom; like St. Paul he feels his message to be to
some a savour of life unto life, to others a savour of death unto
death.

The Doctrine.--And what is the message he proclaims? It is a
philosophy of the origin of the world, but a philosophy the
acceptance of which involves immediate and strenuous action. The
distracted condition of the world before him requires to be
explained, so that a remedy for it may be found; and Zarathustra
prays, when he is about to bring forward his doctrine, that Ahura
would help him to explain how the material world arose. The
exp