n instantly
made deformity, impurity, and gloom, in opposition to it. All
beauty, virtue, harmony, truth, blessedness, were the work of the
former. All ugliness, vice, discord, falsehood, wretchedness,
belonged to the latter. They grappled and mixed in a million
hostile shapes. This universal battle is the ground of ethics, the
clarion call to marshal out the hostile hosts of good and ill; and
all other war is but a result and a symbol of it. The strife thus
indicated between a Deity and a Devil, both subordinate to the
unmoved ETERNAL, was the Persian solution of the problem of evil,
their answer to the staggering question, why pleasure and pain,
benevolence and malignity, are so conflictingly mingled in the
works of nature and in the soul of man. In the long struggle that
ensued, Ormuzd created multitudes of co operant angels to assail
his foe, stocking the clean empire of Light with celestial allies
of his holy banner, who hang from heaven in great numbers, ready
at the prayer of the righteous man to hie to his aid and work him
a thousandfold good. Ahriman, likewise, created an equal number of
assistant demons, peopling the filthy domain of Darkness with
counterbalancing swarms of infernal followers of his pirate flag,
who lurk at the summit of hell, watching to snatch every
opportunity to ply their vocation of sin and ruin. There are such
hosts of these invisible antagonists sown abroad, and incessantly
active, that every star is crowded and all space teems with them.
Each man has a good and a bad angel, a ferver and a dev, who are
endeavoring in every manner to acquire control over his conduct
and possession of his soul.

The Persians curiously personified the source of organic life in
the world under the emblem of a primeval bull. In this symbolic
beast were packed the seeds and germs of all the creatures
afterwards to people the earth. Ahriman, to ruin the creation of
which this animal was the life medium, sought to kill him. He set
upon him two of his devs, who are called "adepts of death." They
stung him in the breast, and plagued him until he died of rage.
But, as he was dying, from his right shoulder sprang the
androgynal Kaiomorts, who was the stock root of humanity. His body
was made from fire, air, water, and earth, to which Ormuzd added
an immortal soul, and bathed him with an elixir which rendered him
fair and glittering as a youth of fifteen, and would have
preserved him so perennially had it not bee