In the second century A.D. there had been a man in Fars named Papak the son of Sassan, who took as his motto the well-known lines from Marlowe: 

     “Is it not passing brave to be a king
     And ride in triumph through Persepolis?”

—­Persepolis, indeed, was gone, and only its vast and pillared ruins remained in the wilderness; but near by the town of Istakhr had grown up, to be what Persepolis had been in the old Achaemenian days,—­the heart and center of Fars, which is spiritually, the heart and center of all Iran.  Papak thought he would make Istakhr serve his purpose; and did;—­and reigned there in due course without ever a Parthian to say him nay.  In 212 he died; and what he had been and desired to be, that his son Ardashir would be in turn, and much more also.  This Ardashir was very busy remembering the story of the Achaemenidae:  men, like himself, of Fars; men, like himself, of the One and Only True Religion:  but further, conquerors of the world and Kings of the kings of Iran and Turan.  And if they, why not he?—­So he goes to it, and from king of Istakhr becomes king of Fars; and then unobtrusively takes in Karmania eastward;—­until news of his doings comes to the ears of his suzerain Artabanus King of Parthis, who does not like it.  Artabanus has recently (217) received in indemnity a matter of seven and a half million dollars from a well-whipped Roman emperor; and is not prepared to see his own uderlings give themselves airs;—­so whistles up his horde of cavalry, and marches south and east to settle things.  Three battles, and the Parthian empire is a thing of the past; and Ardashir (which is Artaxerxes) the son of Papak the son of Sassan sits in the great seat of the Achaemenidae.

Now this is the key to all the history of the west in those times; and we may include West Asia in the west:—­the world was going down, and each new phase of civilization was something worse than the one before.  I cannot but see degeneracy, and with every age a step further from ancient truth:  Rome with less light than Greece; the Sassanians a feebble copy of the Achaemenians:—­knowledge of the Realities receding ever into the past.  A new spirit had been coming in since the beginning of the Christian era, or since the living flame of the last-surviving Mysteries was quenched.  It is one we are but painfully struggling away from now; it has tainted all life west of China since.  China, with her satellite nations, alone in the main escaped it:  I mean, the spirit of religious intolerance.

The odium of introducing it belongs not (as you might think) to one particular religious body, but to the evil in humanlty; on which, since the Mysteries were destroyed, there had been no effective check.  The corner-stone of true religion is the Divine Spirit omnipresent in Nature; the Divine Soul in Man.  As well forbid the rest of men to breathe the air you breathe, or walk under your private stretches