There the Eleusinian Mysteries were celebrated in her honor. This incident in the life of Demeter is told at length in the sacred Homeric Hymn to Demeter where she is often called the fruitbringer, the goddess of the spring season. She presided over the seed time and harvest and was, therefore, the goddess of settled institutions and laws.

Besides the twelve immortal inhabitants of Olympus enumerated above, the Greeks worshipped an indefinite number of scarcely lesser deities; every river and mountain, every forest and dell, every sight and sound, indeed, every thought and act had its god.

The bond of connection between gods and men was the Greek idea of heroes. They were the offspring of gods and beautiful earth-born women. Thus the sons of the gods became the founders of races and the patrons of the professions and the arts. The Greeks never had the dark and terrible notion of two rival principles, a good and a bad, contending for the mastery of the universe. They humanized everything, even their gods who freely allied themselves with mortals, and no mediator stood between them. Every man, woman, and child was at liberty to worship, or sacrifice, or pray whenever and wherever, and as often as, the heart desired. Hence the Greek religion was "dogmatically as well as practically one of the brightest and most joyous, no less than the mildest and most tolerant, of ancient creeds."

Still it must be admitted that the gods of the Greeks had few if any of the attributes of real divinity. They were made in the image of men and had all the passions and vices of men. Heraclitus well expressed the matter from the point of view of the Greeks when he said:

Men are mortal gods and the gods are immortal men.''

For the gods had no higher aim than to have a good time. Their usual occupation according to Homer was to make love, to fight, and to feast. In one of their fights represented in the twenty-first book of the Iliad, Homer says that Athene seized a stone and struck Ares on the neck with it, and that when he fell he covered seven acres and defiled his back with dust. In the same fight Here held both of the hands of Artemis in one of hers and beat her over the head with her own bow. But the occasions were rare when they did not, as Homer says, "feast all day till sundown" and then "retire to repose, each one to his own house, which renowned Vulcan, lame in both legs, had built." Whenever they took part in the affairs of men it was usually to gratify some whim or passion. They had little or no moral purpose and did not by precept or example undertake to guide the consciences of men. No wonder that Plato was shocked at their doings as depicted by Hesiod and Homer, and would not allow the writings of these poets a place in his ideal state.

Yet in spite of all these defects it must be granted that the religion of the Greeks has furnished to the world some of the most important ideas of a genuine religious life. It represented the gods as imminent, ever-present powers, and not mere outside forces having nothing to do with the ongoings of the universe, and thus it set forth the great truth that all nature is alive with the divine. It taught that man could acquaint himself with the gods and co-operate with them as a friend and companion. Nothing, therefore, that concerned the gods was foreign to him. It emphasized the fact that man's chief mission is to develop himself and grow up into likeness to the gods. Because of these ideas it came about that "nowhere on the earth, before or since,

has the human being been educated into such a wonderful perfection, such an entire and total unfolding of itself, as in Greece." These ideas remain to-day the fundamental teachings of a truly progressive religious life.

f. The Avesta of Zoroaster.-The bible of the ancient Persians is called the Avesta, or the ZendAvesta. Avesta probably means the text or the law, and Zend, commentary or explanation. The following facts concerning the Avesta and its history are chiefly taken from the recently published investigations of the subject by Prof. A. V. Williams Jackson, of Columbia. The discovery and first deciphering of the Avesta are due to the efforts of a young French scholar by the name of Anquetil-Duperron. In 1723 a copy of a small portion of the Avesta was secured from the Parsis in Surat, and deposited as a curiosity in the Bodleian library at Oxford. No one, however, was able to read the text. Anquetil happened to see in Paris some tracings made from the Oxford manuscript, and immediately conceived the idea of going to India and obtaining from the priests themselves a knowledge of their sacred books. In 1754 he undertook the journey, and after seven years spent in overcoming almost insurmountable obstacles, he succeeded in winning the confidence of a few of them who taught him the language of the Avesta and initiated him into some of their rites and ceremonies.

The translation of the Avesta published by Anquetil was at one time thought to be a forgery, but later it was conclusively shown to be substantially correct. It made known to European scholars for the first time what is acknowledged to be one of the most ancient and important of all the bibles of the Eastern world.

The authorship of the Avesta is unanimously ascribed by both classical and Persian writers to Zoroaster, whose date was formerly often spoken of as 6000 B.C. This was due to a misinterpretation of the Persian chronology, which makes a difference between the existence of the spiritual essence of Zoroaster, which his disciples claimed began at that date, and the bodily existence. Scholars are now agreed that his physical birth occurred about 660 B.C., in the northern part of Persia, though his religious activity was chiefly in the eastern part. Tradition has surrounded his childhood and youth with numerous miracles, but in reality little is known of him till his thirtieth year. Then he appeared, claiming to have received direct from God a new revelation. He at once began to oppose the superstitious beliefs of his day and to urge the adoption of the new doctrines.

Between his thirtieth and fortieth year seven visions of heavenly and divine truth are said to have come to him. After the visions tradition asserts that he was led by the devil into the wilderness to be tempted, from which trial of his faith he came off entirely the victor. His first convert was his cousin, but he did not gain many followers until he converted the Persian King Vishtaspa and his court. Then his doctrines speedily extended over all Iran. After a life of great activity and usefulness, he was slain in battle during an invasion of his country in his seventy-eighth year. According to our best scholars it is not probable that Zoroaster wrote anything. The revelations that were claimed to have been given to him by God word for word in the form of conversations were, in all likelihood, orally preserved by his disciples and handed down by them to posterity, just as were the Vedas, the

Talmud, the Koran, and the sayings of Jesus. The word Zoroaster, or Zarathustra, as applied to the authorship of the Avesta, is now regarded as indicating a school of high priests of which Zoroaster was the founder rather than the name of any individual. In the opinion of Professor Jackson some portions of the book probably date back a thousand years or more before Christ. Many parts are several centuries later, while others are as recent as the beginning of the Christian era.

The Avesta originally was many times more extensive than at present. Pliny speaks of 2,000,000 verses composed by Zoroaster, and Arabic authorities affirm that it was inscribed in letters of gold on 12,000 COWhides and deposited in the palace library at Persepolis, which was destroyed by the Greeks under Alexander the Great. Making all allowance for Oriental exaggeration, the extent of the original Avesta must have been very great.

From the time of the Macedonian conquest to the accession of the Sassanian kings, that is, for about five hundred years, the religion of ancient Persia, the religion of Cyrus, Darius, and Xerxes, of the Magi of the New Testament who came to worship Jesus at Bethlehem, underwent a rapid decline. Many of the documents containing its doctrines were neglected and lost. But when the Sassanians came to the throne they did everything in their power to revive the ancient faith. They collected all the extant fragments of the Zoroastrian gospel into the collection we now possess, which equals in extent about one tenth of our Bible.

Like our Bible it is a collection of books. The first collection is called the Yasna and is by far the most important. The whole of it now comprises seventy-two