Manes lived long after both of them; and if it should be contended that he differed from them in any very abstruse speculative point, this will not be admitted as a proof that he did not draw his doctrine from their fountain, when it is known that it came from the East of the Euphrates, and when it is evidently the same in almost every other particular.
6. The ancient followers of Zoroaster are not yet extinct. There is “a colony of them settled in Bombay, an island belonging to the English, where they are allowed, without any molestation, the full freedom and exercise of their religion. They are a poor, harmless sort of people, zealous in their superstition, rigorous in their morals, and exact in their dealings, professing the worship of one God only, and the belief of a resurrection and a future judgment, and utterly detesting all idolatry, although reckoned by the Mahometans the most guilty of it; for although they perform their worship before fire and towards the rising sun, yet they utterly deny that they worship either of them. They hold that more of God is in these his creatures than in any other, and that therefore they worship God towards them, as being in their opinion the truest Shekinah of the Divine presence among us, as darkness is that of the devil’s: and as to Zoroastres, they still have him in the same veneration, as the Jews have Moses; looking on him as the great prophet of God, by whom he sent his law, and communicated his will unto them.”[1] Thus it appears that if the Jews have preserved their religion for the last two thousand years, in order to fulfil a miracle or prophecy, the Persians have preserved the same religion without any miracle or prophecy whatever. And it must not be said, that this is confined to one little spot, for they are, like the Jews, dispersed all over Asia.
Although there is the most indisputable evidence, that the Magi, who were the priests of Persia, acknowledged one Supreme Being, called Oromasdes, yet they certainly worshiped the sun under the name of Mithra, the second person of their Trinity. They are said to have done this as only to an emblem or symbol—the seat and throne—of the Supreme Being. But it probably soon came to pass that the Supreme Being was forgotten, and that his image only was adored by the people. The Persian Magi have always denied that they worshiped fire in any other sense than as an emblem of the Supreme Being, but it is extremely difficult to ascertain the exact truth; and the difficulty is increased by the circumstance that most ancient philosophers, and, in fact, almost all the early Christian fathers, held the opinion that God consisted of a subtile, ethereal, igneous fluid, which pervaded all nature—that God was fire. Thus, as I have before remarked, he appeared to Moses in the burning bush, and again upon Sinai.
All the Oriental and Grecian writers agree in ascribing to the Persians the worship of one Supreme God: they only differ as to the time when this first began to take place. Much more attention is due to the ancient Oriental, than to the Grecian, histories of Persia, and they all represent the worship of one Supreme God as having begun very early, and this is confirmed, in a considerable degree, by the rebuilding of the Temple of Jerusalem by Cyrus. There is no doubt that the Persian religion was reformed, or improved by some one, that the capital of the empire of the Magi was at one time at Balch, and that it was from this place their religion spread both into India and the West. It was in the neighbourhood of that city, where the first orbicular caves, of which we have heard so much, were excavated, long before the time of Cyrus.
Mr. Maurice says, “But it is now necessary that we should once more direct our attention towards Persia. The profound reverence, before noticed, to have been equally entertained by the Magi of Persia and the Brachmans of India, for the solar orb and for fire, forms a most striking and prominent feature of resemblance between the religion of Zoroaster and that of Brahma.”[2]
