right; the other, in love, benevolence, and kindness.  Zoroaster teaches providence:  the monk of India teaches prudence.  Zoroaster aims at holiness, the Buddha at merit.  Zoroaster teaches and emphasizes creation:  the Buddha knows nothing of creation, but only nature or law.  All these oppositions run back to a single root.  Both are moral reformers; but the one moralizes according to the method of Bishop Butler, the other after that of Archdeacon Paley.  Zoroaster cognizes all morality as having its root within, in the eternal distinction between right and wrong motive, therefore in God; but Sakya-muni finds it outside of the soul, in the results of good and evil action, therefore in the nature of things.  The method of salvation, therefore, according to Zoroaster, is that of an eternal battle for good against evil; but according to the Buddha, it is that of self-culture and virtuous activity.

Both of these systems, as being essentially moral systems in the interest of humanity, proceed from persons.  For it is a curious fact, that, while the essentially spiritualistic religions are ignorant of their founders, all the moral creeds of the world proceed from a moral source, i.e. a human will.  Brahmanism, Gnosticism, the Sufism of Persia, the Mysteries of Egypt and Greece, Neo-Platonism, the Christian Mysticism of the Middle Ages,—­these have, strictly speaking, no founder.  Every tendency to the abstract, to the infinite, ignores personality.[133] Individual mystics we know, but never the founder of any such system.  The religions in which the moral element is depressed, as those of Babylon, Assyria, Egypt, Greece, Rome, are also without personal founders.  But moral religions are the religions of persons, and so we have the systems of Confucius, Buddha, Zoroaster, Moses, Mohammed.[134] The Protestant Reformation was a protest of the moral nature against a religion which had become divorced from morality.  Accordingly we have Luther as the founder of Protestantism; but mediaeval Christianity grew up with no personal leader.

The whole religion of the Avesta revolves around the person of Zoroaster, or Zarathustra.  In the oldest part of the sacred books, the Gathas of the Yacna, he is called the pure Zarathustra, good in thought, speech, and work.  It is said that Zarathustra alone knows the precepts of Ahura-Mazda (Ormazd), and that he shall be made skilful in speech.  In one of the Gathas he expresses the desire of bringing knowledge to the pure, in the power of Ormazd, so as to be to them strong joy (Spiegel, Gatha Ustvaiti, XLII. 8), or, as Haug translates the same passage (Die Gathas des Zarathustra, II. 8):  “I will swear hostility to the liars, but be a strong help to the truthful.”  He prays for truth, declares himself the most faithful servant in the world of Ormazd the Wise One, and therefore begs to know the best thing to do.  As the Jewish prophets tried to escape their mission, and called it a burden, and went to it “in the heat and bitterness of their spirit,” so Zoroaster says (according to Spiegel):  “When it came to me through your prayer, I thought that the spreading abroad of your law through men was something difficult.”