2. In the second place, this religion is essentially intolerant and
persecuting. Having chosen his side in the great war which divides
the universe, man can only prosecute that war with all his force; he
must regard the Daevas and their followers as his enemies, and try to
weaken and extinguish them. The general feeling of the ancient world
about differences in religion was that all religions were equally
legitimate, each on its own soil. The Jews, we know, shocked the
Greeks and Romans greatly by denying this, and maintaining that there
was only one true religion, namely, their own, and that all the
others were worships of gods false and vain. But the Persians came
before the Jews in this; the Gathas preach persecution, and the
insults offered by Persian kings in later times to the religions of
Egypt and Greece were no doubt justified by their convictions. In
Persia, as in Israel, religion had come to entertain the notion of
false gods. And a religion which entertains that notion must be
exclusive. Those who have refused to worship beings hitherto deemed
gods, on the ground that they ought not to be worshipped and are not
truly gods, cannot but desire to bring the worship of such beings
entirely to an end, and to make the worship of the true God prevail
instead, by rude or by gentle means, as the stage of civilisation may
in each case suggest.

Growth of Mazdeism.--After the Gathas proper we have other hymns
written in the Gathic dialect, from which the history of the religion
after its foundation may be to some extent inferred.[3] These show
that the Zarathustrian religion was regarded, after the departure of
the founder, as a great divine institution, and was worked out on the
lines he had laid down. The forms of it became of course more fixed.
The god it serves is now called "Ahura Mazda," the "All-Knowing Lord"
(the name is afterwards contracted into the Greek Oromazdes, the
Persian Hormazd; and the religion is called from it Mazdeism); he is
still implored for spiritual blessings both for this and for the
future life, and for furtherance in agriculture. There is, however, a
tendency to address prayer not only to Ahura himself but to beings
connected with him. As if the mind wearied of dwelling on the one
supreme, the Bountiful Immortals are associated with him, the parts
of his holy creation are invoked, the fire which is most closely
identified with him, the stars which are his body, the waters, the
earth, all