If we turn to the religion of the Iranian or Persian branch of the Aryan family, we find among them also the traces of a primitive monotheism; and that it was not borrowed from Semitic sources, through the descendants of Abraham or others, Ebrard has shown clearly in the second volume of his “Apologetics.”  Max Mueller also maintains the identity of the Iranian faith with that of the Indo-Aryans.  The very first notices of the religion of the Avesta represent it as monotheistic.  Ahura Mazda, even when opposed by Ahriman, is supreme, and in the oldest hymns or gathas of the Yasna, Ahriman does not appear; there are references to evil beings, but they have no formidable head; Persian dualism, therefore, was of later growth.  Zoroaster, whom Monier Williams assigns to the close of the sixth century B.C.,[147] speaks of himself as a reformer sent to re-establish the pure worship of Ahura, and Haug considers the conception of Ahura identical with that of Jehovah.  High on a rocky precipice at Behistun, Rawlinson has deciphered an inscription claiming to have been ordered by Darius Hystaspes, who lived 500 B.C., which is as clearly monotheistic as the Song of Moses.  The Vendidad, which Rawlinson supposes to have been composed 800 years B.C., is full of references to minor gods, but Ahura is always supreme.  The modern Parsees of Bombay claim to be monotheistic, and declare that such has been the faith of their fathers from the beginning.

A Parsee catechism published in Bombay twenty-five years ago reads thus:  “We believe in only one God, and do not believe in any besides Him....  He is the God who created the heavens, the earth, the angels, the stars, the sun, the moon, the fire, the water, ... and all things of the worlds; that God we believe in, Him we invoke, Him we adore.”  And lest this should be supposed to be a modern faith, the confession further declares that “This is the religion which the true prophet Zurthust, or Zoroaster, brought from God.”

The Shintoists of Japan, according to their sacred book, the “Kojiki,” believe in one self-existent and supreme God, from whom others emanated.  From two of these, male and female, sprang the Goddess of the Sun, and from her the royal line of the Mikados.  There was no creation, but the two active emanations stirred up the eternally existing chaos, till from it came forth the teeming world of animal and vegetable life.

It has often been asserted that tribes of men are found who have no conception of God.  The author of “Two Years in the Jungle” declares that the Hill Dyaks of Borneo are without the slightest notion of a divine being.  But a Government officer, who for two years was the guest of Rajah Brooke, succeeded after long delay in gaining a key to the religion of these Dyaks.  He gives the name of one Supreme being among subordinate gods, and describes minutely the forms of worship.  Professor Max Mueller, while referring to this same often-repeated allegation