, in the fourth period, the victory gained by Ahura-Mazda.
Sosiosh (Saoshyas), the deliverer already foretold in the Vendidad,
appears. The resurrection of the dead, not taught by Zarathustra or in
the Vendidad, takes place. The judgment of the world begins; the good
are received into paradise and the sinners banished to hell. At last,
all is purified, and Angro-mainyus himself and his Dews submit
themselves to Ahura-Mazda, whose victory is celebrated in heaven with
songs of praise.

Thus among the Iranian races, out of the old patriarchal worship of fire
and light, on the occasion of the religious struggle with the Indian
Arya, and under the influence of Zarathustra, there was developed the
doctrine of one supreme God,[3] who, surrounded by the good spirits of
heaven, wages war against evil, whence arose later the moral opposition
between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-mainyus resulting in the victory of the
good principle over the bad. The old dualism of force and matter,
beneficent and destructive powers of nature, light and darkness, becomes
in Parsism moral. The deity, no longer identified with nature, becomes a
personal, spiritual being, the creator of mankind; and the end of the
world's development is conceived as the triumph of the good. Hence the
high rank which the doctrine of Zarathustra and its further development
holds in the history of religion.

3. THE GREEKS.

As man rises in spiritual development, nature becomes to him a
revelation ever more and more manifold of the divine. To the Greek
(Pelasgi, Hellenes) the whole of nature was living, and his imagination
peopled her everywhere with divine beings, who in wood and field, in
rivers and on mountains (Oreads, Dryads, Naiads, Sileni, &c.), hovered
friendly round him. The Greek was indeed distinguished from other
nations by this richer and more elevated view of nature; but he excelled
them most of all in this, that the divine object which he worshiped was
conceived both in form and character after the human. Zeus, Phoebus
Apollo, Pallas Athene, Aphrodite, Ares, Hephaestus, Hestia, Hermes,
Artemis, were originally powers of nature personified, as some epithets
in Homer[4] still indicate; but they became, sometimes under the same
names, types of power and lordship, science and art, courage and
sensuous beauty. While Dionysus, Demeter, Hades, and Persephone remained
earthly, and Helios, Eos, Iris, and Hecate, heavenly divinities, and
Oceanus, Poseidon, Amphitrite,