creed of the Church. Whether the doctrine be true or false, the fact remains that it has triumphed over these difficulties. Mr. Palmer quotes the original authorities, and among those who repudiate the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception are the names of St. Augustine, St. Ambrose, St. Hilary of Poictiers, St. Bernard, Cardinal Cajetan, Pope Gregory the Great, Innocent III., and Thomas Aquinas. It is difficult to understand how authorities like these can at one time be made use of for the establishment of doctrine, and at another time be utterly set aside. That there is but a single step, and that a short one, between the belief in the Blessed Virgin's Immaculate Conception and the offering to her worship which is due to God alone all Protestants believe. Whatever the theory of the honour rendered to her may be, there can be no doubt that in actual practice she is worshipped. Many proofs of this statement may be given. Thus, the devotions to the Virgin in the popular handbooks used by Romanists far exceed, in point of number, those to God the Father or to our Blessed Lord. The Blessed Virgin is styled in the Roman Litany of the Virgin "the Refuge of sinners." And in the porch of the church, S. Maria delle Grazie, close to the Vatican, the text Heb. iv. 16 is set up in large permanent letters, with this important change, "Let us come to the throne of the Virgin Mary," instead of "throne of grace," as it stands in the Bible. Many, too, of the attributes possessed by God alone are ascribed to her in Roman Catholic devotional language. "It is not necessary," says Luthardt, as quoted in the pamphlet before us, "in order to give her the honour that is due, to exalt her above the limits of the common mortal weakness of our nature. To this honour she herself never laid claim. Her honour is to have been the mother of the Redeemer and the handmaid of the Lord, who, from the beginning of His ministry at Cana till its termination on the cross, kept as a creature, though the most highly-favoured, at the same distance as all other mortals, that she might, through that very act, draw as near to Him as all the redeemed."

THE LIMITATION OF CHRIST'S KNOWLEDGE.-That the attribute of omniscience did not belong to our Lord during His earthly life is, one would think, plainly enough declared in Scripture, though we may find it impossible to reconcile the fact of limitation of knowledge with that of His essential divinity. Thus in Luke ii. 52 it is said that "He increased in wisdom," and in Mark xiii. 32 He Himself says, "of that day and that hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels which are in heaven, neither the Son, but the Father" (cf. Matt. xxiv. 36). Most orthodox divines have accepted these statements without admitting that they cast any slur upon the doctrine of Christ's divinity, or that they imply that He was fallible as a teacher. Some of the more thorough-going opponents of the "higher criticism," however, have sought to strengthen their case by asserting that our Lord decides the question of the authorship of the Pentateuch and of Psalm cx., and by claiming for Him omniscience. It is interesting to observe the desperate straits to which they are reduced in trying to explain away the passages above quoted. Of the

statement in St. Luke, the late Prebendary Bassett says that Jesus did not really "increase in wisdom," but that "to men's appreciation, in His mental powers, He appeared to grow in wisdom as He gave evidence of His abilities." The commentator thus contradicts the inspired evangelist point blank, but we prefer to believe the evangelist. As to the passage in St. Mark, he says that it stands alone as "a solitary text" seemingly "at variance with the rest of Scripture testimony," that it is "a text which appears to contradict other texts, many other texts, perhaps all other texts." Bishop Ryle, in a pamphlet entitled The Present Crisis, admits that "our Lord was really and truly man, and that from His birth He 'increased in wisdom and stature' like other men." But he says that he "cannot believe for a moment that His knowledge was imperfect and limited when He came to full age." He overlooks the fact that growth necessarily implies limitation-that it implies expansion perhaps to indefinitely large, but not to infinite, proportions. He is specially unfortunate in his remarks upon the passage in the second Gospel. "That in the mysterious counsels of the eternal Trinity it was appointed that the Son, during His earthly ministry, should not know, as a thing to be revealed to the Church, the precise date of His own second advent and the end of the world, I can believe, and I think with reverence that I see wisdom in the appointment" (p. 33). In other words, he implies that Christ did know the matter in question, but not as a thing to be revealed to the Church. Again, we have a conflict between the commentary and the text, and we prefer to adhere to the text. We think that in a matter like this, which is so much above our comprehension, the Bishop might have abstained from expressing his approval of what he supposes to have been the wisdom of the Divine procedure, even although he protests he does so "with reverence." In the Churchman the Rev. W. T. Hobson deals in a very reasonable manner with the whole question. He says, "Error on the part of our Lord is excluded, and His infallibility guaranteed to us, by the conditions under which He acted as our Teacher. As the Father's Servant and Messenger, He taught only what He was taught and commanded to teach.' As the great Prophet of God that was to come into the world, with the Holy Spirit given Him without measure, He was infallible in all He taught. His infallibility can be maintained abundantly. His omniscience during the days of His flesh cannot. It has been given up past recall by too many of our standard-bearers, and according to them, by our Lord Himself and His Apostles. On what ground do we receive and believe the teaching of Isaiah, of Matthew, John, Peter, and Paul? Not because we believe they were omniscient, but because we believe they were inspired, and so taught of God. So we sit at the feet of Jesus as the great Prophet of God, and believe what He taught as the teaching of God Himself by His Son. Whatsoever He heard from the Father He made known to His disciples. Whatsoever He made known to

His disciples He had heard from the Father. Some things-one thing at any rate, the day and hour of His second coming-He had not heard from the Father, and so did not make known unto us."

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BIBLICAL THOUGHT.

ZOROASTER AND ISRAEL.

III.

BY THE REV. JAMES HOPE MOULTON, M.A.

THE preceding investigation will help us to answer the question what religion was professed by Cyrus and Cambyses. That it was not Gâthic Zoroastrianism is clear, and we gather from the same evidence an antecedent probability that it was the Iranian Mazdeism just described. For though reigning in a non-Aryan country, Cyrus was an Achæmenid, and therefore an Iranian. He was, therefore, presumably a worshipper of Ahura as supreme deity, but was not the fanatical Zoroastrian monotheist pictured by many writers before the discovery of his cylinder-inscription, nor on the other hand was he the indifferent polytheist of more recent accounts. He worshipped other deities beside Auramazda, and among them the clan-gods: (whether one or more of these deities presided over each clan, such as the Achæmenid, we have no means of deciding). So politic a ruler would easily see the advantages of conciliating his subjects by publicly worshipping their gods; and as Bel Merodach might be regarded as tutelary deity of the Babylonians, or Jehovah of the Jews, Cyrus was not violating his own creed by declaring himself helped by the deities of other races. Moreover, his own phrase, "the God of heaven," does describe exactly the Iranian Sky-god Mazda, and the Babylonian Merodach no less. A true Zoroastrian could not have thus accommodated himself; a holder of the creed professed, as we have seen, by all the Achæmenids up to Mnemon could do so with perfect consistency.

III. We come last to Magism, the latest and most potent force in the corruption of Zarathushtra's teaching. That this was essentially a nonAryan religion has been held by Rawlinson and many other scholars. Any student of the Avesta who reads a sketch of Babylonian religion will notice

1I must admit that the names of the great conqueror and his son seem to me Iranian, despite Prof. Sayce. The Sanskrit names Kuru and Kamboja suit the Persian forms exactly, if we suppose the latter modified to *Kambujya when the adjective suffix is added. (I cannot follow Prof. Sayce outside the realm of Indo-European philology, but I am encouraged to dissent from his decision as to "non-Aryan" forms by his note on the Persian spaka, "dog," which he very hastily pronounces non-Aryan "on account of the final guttural’ [Herod. p. 68]. But this is only the common suffix -qo-s-see Brugmann, Grundriss, in loc. On these names see the interesting suggestions of Spiegel, Altpers. Keilinschr.3, p. 96. He thinks them Indo-Iranian heroes of fable, whose names were revived naturally in a royal family. Kamboja in Sanskrit is always a geographical name, and so is Kuru often, which explains their appearance in Iran with the same function, in the modern names Kamoj and Kur. There is the further acute suggestion that the myths about Cyrus may be largely due to confusion between the historical and the mythical heroes. (The objection that the first syllable in Cyrus's name is long seems to me weak, for in Old Persian it may as well be short, and the evidence of foreign transliterations goes for very little.)

striking coincidences which do not touch at any point the system of the Gâthâs. Before we collect the features of Avestan religion which may reasonably be assigned to this foreign source, we may examine the evidence bearing on the Magi themselves.

Firstly, then, there is the statement of Herodotus (i. 101) that the Magi were one of the five Mýdov yévea. Oppert's interpretation of the five names would make them the Old Persian appellations for castes which the Persians found in Media when they first came into the country. That 'Apiavoi answers to an O.P. *ariyazantu, "of Aryan race," is most probable, and the existence of this caste would alone suggest that the other four castes, including the Magi, were not Aryan. I am disposed to suggest a rather different account of the name Máyou from that which Oppert gives (ap. Sayce, Herod. p. 62). The phonetic agreement of the O.P. magush with the Gothic magus, "boy" (connected with Eng. maid), Old Irish mug, "servant," seems to me to suggest the true etymology of the word. The root-compare Vedic maghá wealth," maghavan “powerful," &c., also our may, might—has apparently the idea of strength; and the Indo-European word *maghu presumably meant strong," naturally applied in the German languages to a grown lad, and in the Keltic (like our maid) developed from "boy" to "servant." If this is the case, the Persians called the Magi "powerful," i.e., as sorcerers and soothsayers, rather than "holy ones," as Oppert thinks, apparently depending on a wrong interpretation of the Sanskrit parallel. Curiously enough, the Babylonian makhkhu, to which Fried. Delitzsch traces the Hebrew Rab-mag, has the meaning "great ones" (Sayce, Hibb. Lect., p. 62). The almost complete identity of meaning between the Shemitic-Accadian word and the native Iranian equivalent, which we see was identical in sound as well, is one of the most remarkable of the freaks of language.

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It may be regarded as certain that Iranian influence, in religion or in other things, must have been comparatively small before the age of Cyrus, though the Iranian Medes were doubtless advancing rapidly towards that preponderance in numbers which seems to have enabled them to give Astyages into the power of his Iranian conqueror. When therefore we find Magism present in Media or Babylonia during the seventh century B.C., we naturally assume that it must have been a non-Aryan system, quite apart from the utter absence of Iranian traits in what we see of it. Now that the Magi were a class established in the country long before Cyrus appears from many indications. First comes the title Rab-mag (Jer. xxxix. 3, 13), which (if Delitzsch is right) will be the native Babylonian designation of the official head of the sacred caste. In Herodotus (i. 108) the Magian interpreters of dreams are advisers-in-ordinary to the Median king Astyages. Classical writers generally, especially in the convergent traditions which tell of Pythagoras's travels in Babylonia, connect the Magi and the Chaldeans, regarding them as closely akin, though distinct classes. All this, of course, is evidence easily discounted if any strong argument comes up in a different direction; but it must be weighed fairly in its bearing on the features of Magism yet to be

studied. Moreover, we have, in Ezekiel viii. 16, 17, testimony which absolutely demands, I think, the interpretation afforded by the present theory. The chapter describes the idolatries prevalent in Jerusalem at the end of the seventh century B.C., to which the Captivity is assigned as the penalty. The prophet in vision sees a series of "abominations" in the temple, each pronounced worse than the preceding. First comes a debased animal worship, then the common Shemitic cult of Tammuz or Adonis. There comes as a climax the worship of the sun accompanied by the holding of "the branch to the nose." Those who have tried to find some other explanation will best realize the certainty that we have here the barsom, the familiar "bundle of fine tamarisk boughs" (Strabo) which the Parsee priest holds during sacrifice: it is the baresma of the Vendidad, but probably not (as we saw before) that of Iranian Mazdeism as reflected in the earlier portions of the Yashts, and certainly not the barhis of the Veda. Are we to suppose, then, that Zoroastrianism in its latest developments had penetrated Palestine in the pre-Exilic age? One who knows the loftiness of that creed, even when defaced by its later accretions, will always wonder at its being described as the vilest "abomination" of those there depicted by Ezekiel. But happily we have every kind of improbability converging against such a supposition. All the conditions are fulfilled by the recognition here of a non-Zoroastrian and non-Aryan Magism, whose distinctive ritual, two centuries later, was incorporated with the Zoroastrian and Aryan elements to make our Avesta. That Ezekiel is bidden to regard this Magism as a worse abomination even than the Tammuz cult is possibly due to the fact that the former represented a new importation, which, as such, involved a greater fall from the national religion than did the survival of an old Shemitic superstition, however degraded. It must be admitted that the horror thus felt for the ritual of Magism can hardly have recommended the purer doctrines of Zarathushtra when they came to the Jews in company with that ritual: on this point I need not repeat the remarks I made in my first paper (THINKER, vol. i., pp. 405, 408).

We come now to the subject of the Magian revolt under Gaumâta, on the ruins of which the great Darius reared his throne. Our chief authority here is, of course, the narrative of Darius himself on the Behistân inscription, which may be summarized thus. Kambujiya (Cambyses), son of Kuru (Cyrus), had a brother named Bardiya (Smerdis), whom he slew, his army knowing nothing of it. Kambujiya went to Egypt, and a revolt broke out in Persia, Media, and the other provinces. It was headed by Gaumâta, a Magian, who lied to the people, saying, "I am Bardiya, son of Kuru, brother of Kambujiya." He raised his revolt at Paishiyâuvâdâ, near a mountain named Arakadrish, in Persis. The whole country acknowledged him, and Kambujiya slew himself. The sovranty which Gaumâta thus took from Kambujiya had been from long time past in the Achæmenid family. There was no one, neither Persian nor Mede nor Achæmenid, who would have wrested the kingdom from the Magian, for the people feared him greatly, lest