wife, his children,
and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who
cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law
of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices.'

To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth
better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's
world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the
spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order
and of Good.

For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not
for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the
difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful;
to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them
at last impersonate and a person.

Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their
great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his name
signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who
lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to
solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who
has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,
Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned
being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd
alike in nature and in man. He was the cause of the fall of man, the
tempter, the author of misery and death; he was eternal and uncreate as
Ormuzd was. But that, perhaps, was a corruption of the purer and older
Zoroastrian creed. With it, if Ahriman were eternal in the past, he
would not be eternal in the future. Somehow, somewhen, somewhere, in the
day when three prophets--the increasing light, the increasing truth, and
the existing truth--should arise and give to mankind the last three books
of the Zend-avesta, and convert all mankind to the pure creed, then evil
should be conquered, the creation become pure again, and Ahriman vanish
for ever; and, meanwhile, every good man was to fight valiantly for
Ormuzd, his true lord, against Ahriman and all his works.

Men who held such a creed, and could speak truth and draw the bow, what
might they not do when the hour and the man arrived? They were not a
_big_ nation. No; but they were a great nation, even while they were
eating barley-bread and paying tribute to their conquerors