^KRY OF PRI/VCf^ 
 
 jj A. 
 
THE WISE MEN: 
 
 tDI)ci tl)eg vont; 
 
 ^ow tl)CB came to ]ittu5akm. 
 
 BY 
 
 FRANCIS W.^PHAM, LL.D., 
 
 l^OFESSOE OF MENTAL PHILOSOPHY IN RUTGEES FEMALE COLLEGE, 
 CITY OF NEW YOKK. 
 
 Behold, there came "Wise Men from the East to Jerusalem, 
 saying, Where is He that is bom King of the Jews? for we 
 have seen his Star. 
 
 NEW YORK: 
 SHELDON AND COMPANY. 
 
 1869. 
 
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1869, by 
 
 SHELDON AND COMPANY, 
 
 In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the United States for the 
 
 Southern District of New York. 
 
 STEREOTYPED AT THE 
 
 Boston Stereotype Foundry, ♦ 
 No. 19 Spriag Lane. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 Chapter Page 
 
 I. Who Were the Wise Men? i 
 
 II. Meaning of "The East," 23 
 
 III. Character and Religion of the Persians, . 59 
 
 IV. The Magi, 95 
 
 V. Persians, Chaldeans, and Hebrews, . . . 107 
 
 VI. Daniel and the Magi, 119 
 
 VII. Hope of the Messiah in Syria and the East, 139 
 
 VIII. Kepler's Discovery, 145 
 
 IX. Astrological Element in the N^vjirative, . 166 
 
 X. Inspiration of St. Matthew, . . • T • ^75 
 
 XI. Summary, 1S6 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 I. The East and the Far East, .... 199 
 II. Relation of the Persian and the Hebrew 
 
 Religions 221 
 
THE WISE MEN" 
 
 CHAPTER I. 
 
 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 There is a spirit that believes, and yet inquires. 
 In this spirit let us inquire, Who were those Pilgrims, 
 who, when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judea, in 
 the days of Herod the King, came to Jerusalem, saying. 
 Where is He that is born King of the Jews, for we have 
 seen his Star in the East? And how were they moved 
 by a Star to undertake their long pilgrimage ? — a pil- 
 grimage no less instructive, if its causes were better 
 understood. 
 
 St. Matthew calls them Magi.^ The English transla- 
 tion of the Bible, by substituting for this title Wise 
 Men, leaves their secret untold. For by their title 
 St. Matthew tells who those strangers were. 
 
 If, in some historical memoir, we find it written, 
 that in the reign of George HI. there came to Lon- 
 don, Brahmins, — we know their country and their 
 character ; we know they were natives of India, and of 
 
 ^ The Vulgate wisely keeps the word. 
 
2 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 its sacred caste; know their complexion, dress, and 
 manners, their religious opinions and customs. Of such 
 effect is St. Matthew's note of the pilgrims to the Holy 
 City. 
 
 He opens their story with a brief introduction, where 
 one great fact — even the birth of Jesus — is stated 
 in fewest words, where some historical and geographi- 
 cal knowledge is taken for granted ; and it is in keep- 
 ing that in this, his description of the strangers is by 
 their title, only. This, too, is brief; but portraiture in 
 the flowing style of romance, or with the minuteness of 
 a child's history book, would be out of place in a gos- 
 pel. A title is, more or less, a description. To call men 
 Mandarins, is to describe them ; and thus the title Magi 
 here stands for pages, in more diffuse and less suggestive 
 writers ; for when St. Matthew^ calls these foreigners 
 Magi, he tells their nation, and their character. Their 
 title introduces them as Persians of the sacred or priestly 
 order of Persia. 
 
 In the first Christian century, the title Magi, in its 
 oldest sense, was thus distinctive and honorable. But, 
 besides this, in the Koman Empire the word had an- 
 other meaning. This was, in part, consequent upon 
 historical changes running through several centuries ; 
 but these may be stated in a few words. Before the 
 rise of the Roman power, in the days of the old Per- 
 sian Empire (B.C. 558-331), the Greeks knew the 
 Magi well, as the impei;ial priesthood of what was 
 then the great Empire of the earth. After that Empire 
 was destroyed by Alexander the Great, they continued 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? ^ 
 
 to know them well, so long as they themselves ruled 
 over Persia. This lasted but about a century ; and, 
 like the English in India, the Greeks in Persia at- 
 tempted no radical changes in religion. Like the Eng- 
 lish in India, the Greeks in Persia were an army of 
 occupation, ruling through great families and tribes, 
 and disturbino^ as little as mioht be social and reliirious 
 institutions. Hence, relatively to the Persian people, 
 the Magi, under the Greek rule, were much as they 
 were before — as now the Brahmins in India under 
 British rule ; and they were so under the subsequent 
 Parthian rule in Persia, that began about one hundred 
 and fifty years before the Christian era, and lasted for 
 a little more than two hundred years after it. Under 
 the Parthians, as under the Greeks, the Magi were 
 degraded from that high, preeminent place, conspic- 
 uous throughout the world, which they held in the old 
 Persian Empire ; yet they must have been treated with 
 consideration by the Parthian dynasty, for otherwise 
 it could not have retained its power so long. This also 
 appears from the fact, that when the Persians regained 
 their independence (A. D. 226), the Magi, strong in 
 numbers and in the veneration of their countrymen, at 
 once took the same place in the later Persian Kingdom 
 they held in the old Persian Empire. The Magi, then, 
 were really the sacerdotal order in Persia from the fall 
 of its Empire (B. C. 331) onward to and after the 
 Christian era. 
 
 But this w^as not well known in the Roman Empire, 
 within which Persia was never included. The Par- 
 
4 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 thians were jealous, and their realm was almost im- 
 penetrable by foreigners. For more than a century 
 before the Christian era, the world beyond the Tigris 
 was ever becoming less known to the Greeks ; and it 
 was never well known to the Romans. Incessant war 
 restricted their armies to the Euphrates, or to the 
 Tim'is. Their lemons never climbed the mountain 
 ranges that defend the western frontier of Persia. 
 From the heights of the Zagros, the Roman Eagles 
 never looked eastward over the old Persian realm. A 
 cloud of Parthian arrows hid Iran from the West. 
 Hence, in the time of the Parthians, there could have 
 been but little popular knowledge of the internal polity 
 of Persia among the Greeks or the Romans ; ^ and by 
 
 ^ How ignorant even a learned Roman might be, on such 
 subjects, comes out in the strange fables Tacitus recites as to 
 the origin, morals, and usages of the Jews, — as when he 
 says their rites were impure, and that an image of an ass 
 was set up in the Temple. Hist., lib. v. 2-5. Yet the He- 
 brew Scriptures were accessible to him in a Greek transla- 
 tion, and he was narrating one of the greatest events of his 
 time — a war with the Jews, memorable even in the annals of 
 Rome. If such was the ignorance of this historian as to this 
 Eastern people, whose territory had been a part of the Em- 
 pire for four generations, what may not be presumed to have 
 been the popular ignorance of the internal polity of a peo- 
 ple much farther eastward, and on whose original territory 
 no Roman soldier ever set foot. 
 
 Diodorus Siculus, a Greek of the time of Caesar Augus- 
 tus, who used diligence and travelled far to collect a mass of 
 materials for a Universal History, in a fragment of its 34th 
 Book, shows a like strange ignorance of the morals and 
 usages of the Jews. 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN.'' D 
 
 them the Magi almost wholly ceased to be known as 
 an existing priesthood. 
 
 In the Roman World it was the common opinion, 
 that, in very ancient times, magic originated with the 
 priests of the Persians ; ^ and in the Koman World, 
 those who practised magic assumed the name of Magi ; 
 the adepts in the black arts shrewdly seeking to impress 
 the popular imagination by taking to themselves the 
 countenance of the name of an order, that, at the 
 height of its glory, but in a time long past, had been 
 widely honored.^ Thus, in the two prevailing languages 
 of the Roman Empire, in the-; Greek, the language of 
 letters, and in tlie Latin, the language of the laws, 
 the word Magi came into common use in a sense that 
 was related to the distinctive name of the Persian priest- 
 There were Greek colonies that long held their own be- 
 yond the Euphrates, in the time of the Parthians, but their 
 relations with Greece were very different from those of the 
 Jews of those regions with Judea. They were estranged 
 from their kinsmen in Greece by the time of several genera- 
 tions, as well as by a very great distance, and there could 
 have been but very little intercourse between them. 
 
 ^ More exactly — with Zoroaster, the reputed founder of 
 the Persian religion. Of him Justin says, lib. 1, sec. 1, 
 *' Dicitur artes magicas invenisse " — He is said to have 
 found out magic. Pliny says the same. See hereafter, page 
 101. 
 
 ^ For the popular Latin use of the term, see Tacitus, An- 
 nals, ii. 27-31, for an abstract of which, see, hereafter, p. 12 ; 
 xii. 22, where an Empress, on the charge of interrogating 
 Magi, and other misdeeds, was banished, unheard, by the 
 Senate ; vi. 29 ; xii. 59. , 
 
() WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 hood, much as the English word magician is. The 
 new sense of the word differed, in all important re- 
 spects, from its original meaning. It indicated no 
 priestly function, no sacredness of character, little or 
 nothing as to nationality ; and the term that best repre- 
 sents it is, sorcerer.^ Those whom the word in its new 
 sense designated, were numerous in the old heathen Em- 
 pire of Rome, especially in the Eastern Provinces, and 
 in the Capital. They were persons of impure lives and 
 criminal practices. Such were the Magi, popularly 
 known to the Romans and to the later Greeks of the 
 West, whose writers had little occasion to use the term, 
 save in this sense. 
 
 This popular evil sense of the term is sharply felt in 
 the words tliat Arnobius,^ a Christian writer (A. D. 303) , 
 puts into the mouth of a heathen, who scornfully says 
 of Christ, so like what the Jews said to Him, " A Ma- 
 gus was He ; He did all things through unlawful arts." 
 St. Jerome,^ near the close of the fourth century, says, 
 *' Common custom and common speech treat the Magi 
 as malefactors." And most of the fathers, very natu- 
 rally, attached to the word in St. Matthew the signifi- 
 cance it had in the world around them.^ Living in the 
 
 * It is thus rendered in the English Bible. Acts xiii. G. 8. 
 ^ Adversus Gentes, lib. iii. sec. 43 : " Magus fuit : clau- 
 
 destinis artibus omnia ilia pcrfecit." 
 
 ^ Dan. ii. *' Consuetudo et sermo communis Magos pro 
 maleficis accepit ; " but in the same place he refers to the 
 use of the word in a better sense. 
 
 * St. Ignatius, near the end of the second century, Epis- 
 tle to the Ephesians, chap. iv. 13, says, " By the Star all 
 
midst of an encompassing blackness of heathenism, and 
 abhorring the sight of its dark and cruel rites, they were 
 readily inclined to see in the pilgrimage to Bethlehem 
 the triumph of the Kingdom of Light over the foul 
 superstitions and black arts of the Kingdom of Dark- 
 ness — an idea in which there unquestionably was an 
 element of truth, but carried to the extreme, in eon- 
 sequence of their confounding those Magi with the 
 sorcerers of the guilty heathen world around them. 
 
 Thus, alike from heathen and from Christian writers, 
 the term Magi, in this sense, was handed down to the 
 ecclesiastical schools of the Dark and of the Middle 
 
 That such was its meaning in St. Matthew, was also 
 authoritatively suggested, and seemingly confirmed, by 
 the fact that St. Luke used the term in its later signifi- 
 cance. Thus various causes long combined to de- 
 termine the meaning of the word in St. Matthew to this 
 sense. 
 
 Such having been the causes of this ancient and 
 abiding interpretation, we need not be surprised at its 
 existence, or at its continuance. Perhaps the discern- 
 ment that there must be in it somewhat of error, which 
 
 magic art was dissolved, and every bond of wickedness 
 disappeared.'* St. Augustine (Serm. 200), referring to the 
 Magi who came to Bethlehem, says, " Praevalet — im- 
 pietas in sacrilegiis Magorum ; " which may be freely trans- 
 lated as, — Impiety characterized the sacrilegious rites of 
 the Magi. 
 
 ^ Abelard, in the twelfth century, says : Is there indeed one 
 
8 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 appears in the English version, and in various ways in 
 modern comment, is the more surprising ; for this modern 
 divergence from the old interpretation does not justify 
 itself by going far enough in the right direction to reach 
 any solid ground to stand upon. 
 
 It still remains to prove, — what, as yet, I have but 
 asserted, — if proved it can be, that the ancient opinion 
 as to the significance of the word in St. Matthew is 
 wrong, and that he used it in its original sense. If 
 this can be done, the nationality of the pilgrims is 
 known, and there is some hope of throwing clear his- 
 torical light on their pilgrimage to Jerusalem. 
 
 The fact that St. Luke used the term in its later 
 sense, seems a strono^ aro^ument ao-ainst this ; and it is 
 a correct general principle, that, if one Evangelist uses 
 a word in a certain sense, it is to be presumed that 
 another Evangelist uses it in the same. But the word 
 in question is not of those religious terms that have 
 one unvarying significance. It is a descriptive, histori- 
 cal epithet, which has two meanings, that are quite 
 distinct ;^ and St. Luke may have used it in one, and St. 
 
 who is ignorant that the Magi are so detestable that by law 
 not only they, but all who incline towards them, are put to 
 death? Quis enira Magos in tautnra detestandos esse igno- 
 ret, ut non soUiin ipsos, sed etiam quemlibet ad eos decli- 
 nantem, lex interfici jubeat? — In Epiph. Dom. Serin. 4. 
 
 ^ Some surmise that the good character of the word Magi, 
 as that of some other words has done, ran down into a 
 bad one, and that, in St. Matthew's time, it was in a state 
 of transition ; others, that it was then a general name for 
 men of science ; and, that so, perchance, the Evangelist 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 9 
 
 Matthew in the other. St. Luke, though born in Syria, 
 was probably a Greek. He was a man of letters, and 
 had travelled far and wide in the West. In the Acts of 
 the Apostles he addressed the Roman World, and 
 naturally used this word in its common Roman sense. 
 St. Matthew, a Hebrew of Galilee, on the eastern edge 
 of the Empire, who, probably, had not been out of 
 Palestine, and who wrote with immediate reference to 
 his countrymen, may as naturally have used this word 
 in its Persian meaning, which we shall find reason to 
 think was its common meaning with the Jews of Pales- 
 tine. Besides this, the facts are these : to a sorcerer 
 
 did not use it in an evil sense. These are only surmises. 
 Others surmise that he added to it " from the East," to 
 avoid the evil sense in the word. This phrase, as will bo 
 shown in Chapter II., is one of the proofs that he used it in 
 its Persian sense. 
 
 The critical insight of the modern age sees that the in- 
 terpretation by former ages of the term Magi is not in har- 
 mony with the spirit of the narrative. Yet the almost 
 unanimous voice of its comment is, that who they were that 
 came to Jerusalem, or whence they came, cannot be de- 
 termined. It is not worth while even to make a selection 
 from the interminable list of those whose writings prove 
 this, or to attempt to specify the few partial exceptions. 
 One very brief citation sums up too general a feeling — " It 
 matters little who they were." But it is fair to suppose 
 that those who have tried to expound even one book of 
 Scripture have found the field too extensive to allow of the 
 patient research required for the solution of these questions, 
 and, without much thouglit about the matter, have had to 
 be content to echo on the current opinion, which, on the face 
 of it, seemed probably correct, 
 
10 WHO WERE THE AVISE MEN? 
 
 St. Luke applies the term ; but, as if aware that the 
 word might have a national sense, he adds, the man was 
 a Jew, and, as if aware that it might have an honor- 
 able sense, that he was a false prophet.^ 
 
 St. Luke's use of the term, then, does not decide 
 that St. Matthew did not use it in its national sense ; 
 and that he did can be decisively proved. 
 
 The presumption is very strong, that the term Magi 
 is used in its Persian sense, when, in the first century, 
 a Hebrew writes to Hebrews of Palestine. They were 
 much nearer to the Persians than were the Romans, or 
 the Greeks. In a former day, the Persians had de- 
 livered them from bondage and exile — a deliverance 
 recorded in their sacred books, and commemorated by a 
 yearly festival.^ Their acquaintance with the Persians, 
 thus begun, was never afterwards wdiolly discontinued. 
 
 ^ Acts xiii. 6. "They found a certain Magus," — Eng- 
 lish translation " sorcerer." Here he guards his use of the 
 word as stated above. He uses it the second time in verse 8, 
 where he explains that it is his translation of the Arabic 
 word Elymas, a name commonly given the man, or assumed 
 by him ; and said to be expressive of wisdom, as the EngUsh 
 word wizard (wise-ard), etymologically considered, is also 
 said to be. So, too, the idea of wisdom in a dark and evil 
 sense, attached to the later meaning of the title Magus. In 
 speaking of Simon the Wizard (Acts viii. 9-11), St. Luke 
 uses terms related to the word Magus in its evil sense, though 
 he does not give him the title. 
 
 ^ The feast of Purim commemorated the deliverance re- 
 corded in the Book of Estiier ; but, as the Passover recalled 
 all the relations of the Hebrews with Egypt, so the Purim 
 all their relations with Persia. 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 11 
 
 The Parthian jealousy of strangers did not exclude from 
 Persia the Jews, settled there before their rule began, 
 — of whom were the Parthians and Medes, who came 
 to the Pentecost. There were great numbers of He- 
 brews in Babylonia, which adjoined Persia, and was 
 then a province of the Parthian empire ; and those 
 eastern Jews kept up with their kinsmen in Palestine 
 an annual intercourse, fostered by commerce and re- 
 ligion. Thus the Hebrews in Palestine, then, had much 
 the same knowledge of the Persians as those earlier 
 Greeks had, — Herodotus and Xenophon, for exam- 
 ple, — who used the term Magi only in its national 
 sense. ^ 
 
 St. Matthew had been an officer of the customs in a 
 town situated on " the way of the sea" ^ of Galilee, one 
 of the roads over which the trade of Persia reached the 
 Mediterranean. Himself the earliest of the Evangel- 
 ists, he gave the title Magi to men who lived in the 
 generation before him. If he had not used this title in 
 its Persian sense, he would have said so, or it vt^ould 
 be implied, or be plain from the context. 
 
 In its popular sense in the Roman empire, the term 
 was dishonorable. St. Matthew^ uses it in no such way. 
 
 1 The word is used as a term of reproach by Sophocles, 
 who died B. C. 405, It is applied by him to a Greek 
 soothsayer, as an epithet of anger, the use of which is to be 
 traced to the feehag of bitterness towards the Persians, 
 growing out of their wars against the Greeks. — (Edipus 
 Tyranuus, 387. 
 
 2 Isaiah ix. 1 ; Matt. iv. 15, 
 
12 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 "^he English version substitutes for it the honorable term 
 "Wise Men." This a2:rees with the tenor of the narra- 
 tive. In the brief style of St. Matthew, everything is 
 significant. The impression given by this great master 
 of history, is the very truth he designed to give. His 
 emphatic "Behold ! there came," the sensation it made, 
 and all else, give the impression, that the coming of 
 these pilgrims was honorable to the Lord. Can he, 
 then, at the very outset, have given them a bad name? 
 Can he have pointed them out as of the crew of jugglers, 
 fortune-tellers, charmers, diviners, who, throughout the 
 Roman World, assumed the ancient name of the priests 
 of Persia but to disgrace it ; who professed to invoke 
 demons, to call out responses from the dead ; who 
 joined to the practice of the black art the craft of 
 poisoners, and pandered to the fiercest and the low^est 
 passions of those two great classes — the credulous 
 and the corrupt ; impostors of a vile and dangerous 
 kind, not less detested in Antioch, in Alexandria, or in 
 Jerusalem, than when in Kome, calling themselves by 
 a once untarnished name, these unhallowed wretches 
 drew down upon them the vengeance of the laws ? 
 
 To prove that I have correctly stated the character 
 and reputation of this class of persons, I call two 
 witnesses of the time — Tacitus and Philo JudiBus. 
 There is a story told by the Latin historian that 
 well illustrates the Latin use of the term Magi, and 
 the character of that class of persons who were called 
 so in Rome. For Tacitus, the story is very fully told ; 
 and I abbreviate the facts of a writer whose words it 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 13 
 
 is not possible to condense. A Senator of Rome, who 
 plied the trade of an informer, coveted the estates of 
 of Libo, a rich young nobleman, related to the family 
 of Augustus Caesar ; and, seeing that he was weakly 
 credulous and rashly ambitious, he allured him to the 
 predictions of the Chaldeans, and Magorum sacra, — 
 the mysterious rites of the Magi. His slaves were 
 bribed to watch him, and — ut infernas umbras car^ 
 minibus eliceret, as he was about to invoke the dead — 
 he was arrested and hurried before the Senate, where 
 the Emperor Tiberius presided in person.^ The un- 
 finished trial was adjourned over, and that night Libo 
 took his own life. But the prosecution did not stop 
 with his death. His estates were divided among the 
 informers, and two of his accomplices in unhallowed 
 practices were executed. One was thrown down the 
 Tarpeian Rock, the other was scourged to death. The 
 Senate then (A. D. 16) passed a decree — I)e Mathe^ 
 maticis Magisque — concerning the Mathematici ^ and 
 the Magi, banisliing them from Italy. The weight of 
 this piece of evidence is not in the use of the word 
 Magi by Tacitus, but in its use in this decree of the 
 Roman Senate. There can be no better testimony as 
 
 ^ Through the evidence of his dealing in magic arts, the 
 suspicion of a wish to conspire against Tiberius was insinu- 
 ated. In this was the venom of the accusation. The scene 
 reminds a little of Scene iv. Act 3, Richard III. 
 
 ^ These Avere astrologers, often called Chaldeans. Aulas 
 Gellius, i. 9, says, " Vulgus, quos gentilitio vocabulo Chal- 
 diEOS dicere oportet Mathematicos djcit," — Those who ought 
 tp be called Chaldeans the people call Mathematici. 
 
14 WHO WERE THE WISE iMEN ? 
 
 to the Latin use of the term Magi, than the testimony 
 of the Senators of Rome embodied in this law, and this 
 hnv goes far to determine the character and reputation 
 of these Magi, not only in Italy, but throughout the 
 Roman World. 
 
 The testimony of Philo supplements this, where it is 
 deficient on the last point ; and is even more important 
 than that which Tacitus preserves, as it differentiates 
 these Magi from the Magi of Persia. Philo, called Ju- 
 daeus, was a learned Jew, of a noble family, who lived at 
 Alexandria in Egypt, one of the great seats of Jewish 
 learning. He was the chief of an embassy, sent by 
 his countrymen in Judea to the Emperor Caligula, at 
 Rome ; and his son married Berenice, a daughter of 
 King Agrippa. The year of his birth, and the year of 
 his death, are unknown ; but he lived in the time of 
 Christ ; for he was a vigorous old man about the year 
 41. He wrote in Greek, and most of his voluminous 
 writings are extant. Providentially there is in them a 
 passage, that enables us to understand the self-styled 
 Magi, and to compare them with those whose name 
 they assumed. To receive its full force, we must con- 
 sider it in its connection. Philo treats of the law con- 
 cerning murder, as laid down by Moses, — explaining 
 and justifying it. After a page or two on the crime of 
 murder, he says, that Moses commands that poisoners 
 and magicians ^ yhould not be allowed to live one day, 
 
 . ^ ol fxdyol yat q^aQuaxevrai-. These novrjooraioi^ persODS of 
 the greatest wickedness, form wilb him but one class in fact. 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 15 
 
 or even one hour ; ^ and then to give a clear idea of 
 the class of persons whom the Mosaic law was so swift 
 to punish, he describes, as just like them, a class of 
 magicians of his owm time ; but first, he carefully dis- 
 tinguishes their magic, from magic of quite another 
 sort. He says, " The true magical art, being a science 
 that contemplates and beholds the books of nature with 
 more acute and clear percei)tion than usual ; and ap- 
 pearing to be a dignified and desirable branch of knowl- 
 
 ^ These are laws that Philo seems to refer to. I give 
 them from the Greek translatioa, known as that of the 
 LXX, or the Septuagiut, which Fhilo used. The reader caa 
 readily compare them with the English version, Deuteron- 
 omy xviii. 9-14. " When thou slialt have entered into the 
 land which the Lord thy God giveth thee, thou shalt not 
 learn to do according to the abominations of those nations. 
 There shall not be found in thee one . . . who uses divi- 
 nation, who deals with omens, and augury ; one who has 
 in him a divining spirit, an observer of signs, questioning 
 the dead. For every one that does these things is an abomi- 
 nation to the Lord thy God ; for because of these abomina.- 
 tions the Lord will destroy them from before thy face." 
 
 Leviticus xix. 30-31. Ye shall keep niy Sabbath, and 
 reverence my sanctuaries ; I am the Lord. Ye shall not 
 attend to those who have in them divining spirits, nor at- 
 tach yourselves to enchanters, to pollute yourselves with 
 them ; I am the Lord your God. xx. 6. The soul that 
 shall follow those who have in them divining spirits, or en- 
 chanters, I will set my face against that soul, and will de- 
 stroy it from among the people. Exodiis xxii. 18. Ye shall 
 not save the lives of socerers. Leviticus xx. 27. As for a 
 man or woman, whosoever of them siiall have in them a 
 divining spirit, or be an enchanter, let them both die the 
 death. Ye shall stone them with stones r they are guilty." 
 
16 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 edge, is studied by kings, and the greatest of kings, 
 and especially by the Persian Monarchs ; and they say, 
 among that people, no one can possibly succeed to the 
 kingdom, if he had not been previously initiated into 
 the mysteries of the Magi."^ 
 
 Philo's testimony to the worth of the science of the 
 true Magi, as a kind of natural philosophy, is important ; 
 and still more so his recognition of the order, as then ex- 
 isting in Persia, and intrusted with the education of 
 its Monarch. In continuation of the passage cited 
 above, Philo goes on to say : " But there is a certain 
 adulterous species of this science, more properly called 
 wicked imposture, which quacks, and cheats, and buf- 
 foons pursue, and the vilest of women and slaves. 
 Professins^ to understand all kinds of incantations and 
 purifications, and promising to change the dispositions 
 of those on whom they operate, so as to turn those who 
 love to unalterable enmity, and those who hate to the 
 most excessive affection, by certain charms and incan- 
 
 ^ In what he says here, there seems to be something of 
 Oriental extravagance. By kings, he may have meant those 
 petty princes, of whom there were so many throughout 
 Asia ; as in Palestine, for instance, Herod the Tetrarch of 
 Galilee, whose Court was at Tiberias, and Philip, whose 
 Court was but a few miles off, at Ca3sarea Philippi. For 
 Persian, must be understood Parthian, and by the greatest 
 of Kings, Parthian Monarchs. Tlie legend on some of the 
 coins of the Parthian Kings in the British Museum is King 
 of Kings. Apart from this testimony of Philo, it is very 
 probable in itself, that the Parthian Princes, like their Per- 
 sian predecessors, wore educated by the Magi. 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 17 
 
 tations, they deceive and gain influence over men of 
 unsuspicious and innocent dispositions, and so they fall 
 into the f^reatest calamities. I imasrine that the Law- 
 giver, having in mind such things, would not suffer the 
 punishment due to poisoners to be postponed." 
 
 Then, having illustrated the law, and having justified 
 its swiftness, by pointing out, in his own day, a class 
 of persons resembling that against which Moses pro- 
 ceeded with sudden severity, he ends with this venomous 
 comparison : " If we only see snakes or other venomous 
 animals, we kill them without a moment's delay, before 
 they can bite, or wound, or attack us at all ; taking care 
 not to expose ourselves to any injury from them, by rea- 
 son of our knowledge of the mischief inherent in them ; 
 in like manner, it is right promptly to punish these 
 men, who, of deliberate purpose, change their nature 
 into the ferocity of untamable beasts, and look on the 
 doing injury to as many people as they can, to be their 
 greatest pleasure." ^ 
 
 As we reflect upon this chapter, written by a He- 
 brew, near the time St. Matthew wrote, and mark the 
 magicians he thinks worthy of instant death, while he 
 commends the Persian Magi, can we doubt to which of 
 
 ^ In the Greek and in the Latin there is no single passage 
 more important than this of Philo, On Special Laws, Sects. 
 17-18, in determining how St. Matthew used the title Magi. 
 I do not know that its bearing on this question has been 
 noted before. This is not so strange as it might seem. The 
 voluminous writings of Philo are so exclusively allegorical, 
 mystical, and didactic, that there seems to be nothing else 
 2 
 
18 WHO WERE THE WISE ^JEX? 
 
 tlie?e two classes St. Matthew would have us think the 
 pilgrims to Jerusalem belonged ? 
 
 Such unhonored Magi as Philo describes would no 
 where have received the honors these pilgrims received 
 in Jerusalem. Such wandering Magi, telling the tale 
 they told in Jerusalem, would have been strangled by 
 order of Herod, without formality or delay. St. ]\Iat- 
 thew, then, must have used the title in an honorable 
 sense; and, if so, then in its national sense; for it is 
 not possible to separate the two. 
 
 That St. jMatthew did use the title Magi in its hon- 
 orable, national sense, is established beyond all doubt 
 by King Herod's reception of these foreigners. This 
 old, suspicious politician, half crazy, and half dead, 
 admitted these strangers to private audience ; and, for 
 them he summoned together the Sanhedrim, the grand 
 council of his kingdom. These Magi, then, must have 
 been nobles — and this might almost be presumed from 
 tlie costly presents they offered to the King in Bethle- 
 hem — nobles, that is, in the Oriental sense of the term, 
 nobility, — persons in royal service, familiar with dig- 
 nitaries, men of high consideration. In Persia, at the 
 Court of the Parthian kings, the chief Magi were so, 
 
 in them at all : and there is very little. So that few have 
 searched tliem through for the grain or two of historic gold 
 tliat might be hidden in the mass ; and, perhaps, no one be- 
 fore having in mind the first verse of the second chapter of 
 St. Matthew. 
 
 Philo is the most redundant of writers. I therefore abridge 
 what I quote from him, by leaving out needless repetitions. 
 
WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 19 
 
 and there only. Their standing thus with the Parthians, 
 who were then, next to the Romans, the haughtiest mili- 
 tary power in the world, is the only possible historical 
 explanation of Herod's reception of these foreigners. 
 Age, infirmities, and the long exercise of despotic 
 power, had exasperated his naturally strong will and 
 high spirit into a moody, ungovernable temper, that 
 was jealous, suspicious, and irritable, almost, if not, at 
 times, quite to madness; and the Magi, making the 
 inquiry they did, were in greater danger from it than 
 probably the}' were aware of: but they were compara- 
 tively safe, if they came under the safe-conduct of gen- 
 erals commanding^ the Parthian armies on the Tis^ris or 
 the Euphrates ; not even the Romans, being more feared 
 by Herod than tlie Parthians, who, in a raid into Ju- 
 dea, had once driven him from his Capital, in such de- 
 spair, that he attempted to take his own life.^ 
 
 Xo writer stamps on the soul a more clear and deep 
 impression of the reality of wdiat he describes than St. 
 Matthew ; yet in his way of doing it, he is by no 
 means so circumstantial as St. Mark; and for him, his 
 narrative of this pilgrimage is uncommonly full and 
 minute. The number and character of the facts stated 
 in it, show that his knowledge of these Persians was 
 very complete. Thus, he gives their feelings at one 
 interesting moment, tlie manner of King Herod in their 
 private audience ; he names the gifts they offered, and 
 he recites their -words. It is natural to think that he 
 who knows so much else about them, must have known 
 
 ^ Josephus, Antiq., lib. xiv. chap. xiii. 7, 8. 
 
20 WHO WERE THE WISE MEN? 
 
 to what country they belonged. It is hardly credible 
 he should not have known this, when, scarce fifty years 
 before, all Jerusalem had known so well who those 
 princely foreigners were, to answer whose inquiry, its 
 haughty king Herod, summoned the council of his 
 realm, its nobles, scholars, and priests. If he had not 
 known who they were, he would have said so. If he 
 did know who they were, he would tell this. If he 
 styles them Magi in the national sense of this title, he 
 does tell this exactly ; and in a brief, yet satisfactory 
 way, that is just like himself. 
 
 That St. Matthew did know the country of the pil- 
 grims, is certain from his last words about them, — " they 
 did not return to Herod, but departed into their own 
 country another way : " — not the usual road to Persia 
 through Damascus, but probably some southern way 
 from the not far distant city of Petra. If their histo- 
 rian had not known their country, he would have said, 
 " they did not return to Herod, but departed from his 
 kingdom." The phrase he uses, closing, as it does, the 
 history of the Wise Men, implies that he knew their 
 route to Jerusalem, and knew they went home by 
 another ; that he knew their country, and had said 
 what country it was. 
 
 There is other evidence of it to be stated hereafter ; 
 but the evidence already adduced is sufficient to prove, 
 that when St. Matthew styled the pilgrims to the Holy 
 City Magi, he meant to say, and did say, they were 
 Persians of the priestly order of Persia. 
 
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 ¥M 
 
 f^ 
 
 
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 >\e" 
 
 ^^\^. 
 
 ^v 
 
 ^f 
 
 ^ 
 
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 CO 
 
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THE EAST AXD THE FAR EAST. 23 
 
 CHAPTER II. 
 
 MEANING OF " THE EAST." 
 
 St. Matthew defined his use of the word Magi, 
 by adding to it, " from the Far East." But the same 
 ill fortune has followed both title and phrase. The 
 geographical, like the historical term, is commonly 
 thou2:ht to be sreneral and van-ue ; yet the national sense 
 of the one has been, and it may be that the definite 
 meaning of the other can be, proved. 
 
 In the Latin and in the English Versions, it is said 
 the Magi were " from the East," and in the same sen- 
 tence it is said they saw the Star "in the East." In 
 this there seems to be somewhat of needless repetition. 
 This is not so in the original Greek. The word for the 
 East is twice there, but the second time its form is 
 chano^ed, and this change in its form chamjes its sense. 
 When used toi>:ether o-eooraphlcallv, the first of these 
 two forms must point to some country more distant than 
 the second does ; and the one should be translated the 
 Far East, the other the East. Therefore, in English, 
 the verses should run thus : "When Jesus was born in 
 Bethlehem of Judea, in the days of Herod the King, 
 behold, there came to Jerusalem, iNIagi from the Far 
 East, savins^, Where Is He that is born Kino^ of the Jews? 
 
24 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 for we have seen his Star in the East, and are come to 
 worship liim."^ 
 
 ** The East," and the "Far East," then, are St. Mat- 
 thew's terms ; and cannot geography and history, in- 
 terrogated together, answer the question, What did 
 tlie East and the Far East mean, in the first century, 
 in Palestine ? They can ; and their answers are addi- 
 tional proof that the Wise Men were Persians — a fact 
 so important as to justify all patience in trying to estab- 
 lish it. They also tell where the Wise Men were when 
 
 ^ TOY de ' Irjuov yei'vijOePTog ev ^ridlehi ttj; ' lovdulag sr 
 r^usQaig 'HQ(h8ov lov ^ucrileo):^ idov, 316.^01, cctto 'Avarol^v 
 nagsyevoPTO fig '^IpQOUolvua leyovTeg. llov icniv 6 TP/delg 
 ^aaiXtvg i(bv ' lovdalop • sidojuev yuo avTOv ibv d-UiiQa iv jrf 
 uirnToXrj^ xal ri).doiiF.v nQOaxwriaai avrib. 
 
 Anatole^ which literally means the risiug, as of the sun, is 
 the common Greek word for the Eastern quarter of the world, 
 whether of the earth or of the heavens. In classical Greek 
 it is used in this sense only in the plural, and without the 
 article. This is the first form of the word in Matt. ii. 1, 2, 
 twice rendered, in the Latin and in the English Version, 
 the East. When used in the original the second time the 
 word is in the singular, and has the definite article. This 
 statement is sufficient to show, even to those familiar only 
 with the English language, that, as here used in a geograph- 
 ical sense, and used together, the last form of the word must 
 have the more restricted significance, and that they should 
 be translated the Far East, and the East. The Greek 
 word is here exactly conformed — as I suppose, by a local 
 usage peculiar to the Hebraized, colloquial Greek of the Jews 
 of Judea — to the two Hebrc . words 3Iizrach and Kedem ; 
 which, when used together in a geographical sense, liave 
 just these meanings. For a more full examination of thia 
 usage, see Appendix, I. 
 
THE EAST AXD THE FAR EAST. 25 
 
 they saw the Star — a new fact, that throws some light 
 on the hitherto unknown of their pilirrimanfe. 
 
 It is true, that European scholars have trusted so 
 confidently to the feeling that St, Matthew's words, on 
 the face of them, are vague, that they have not seriously 
 set themselves to consider whether the fact might not be 
 otherwise. But, of this, there seems to be an explana- 
 tion. The geographical use of the phrases the East, the 
 West, the North, and the South, is especially Asiatic and 
 American ; that is, the vast areas of those two continents, 
 and the monotony of their geographical features, fitting 
 them for dominions more extensive than those of the 
 smaller area of Europe, diversified, as it is, by seas 
 and gulfs and mountains, compel in them a resort to 
 these terms, used in a geographical sense. ^ In Euro- 
 pean kingdoms, where they are less needed, and seldom 
 heard, it may seem they can have no well-established, 
 exact, geographical significance ; but their daily and 
 hourly use in the United States so proves they can, and 
 so elucidates the use of St. Matthew's terms, that some 
 reference to it is a fitting preface to an inquiry into their 
 true meaning. 
 
 These phrases are very sure to come into use, as 
 names for great areas, distinguished by few natural or 
 
 ^ Thus, " the Persian word Boom, — the West, — may al- 
 ways be considered as a general or indefinite name, by which 
 Persian authors describe the provinces west of the Euphrates, 
 to the shores of the Euxine and the Mediterranean/' — His- 
 tory of Persia by Sir John Malcohxi, Minister to the Court 
 of Persia. Loudon, 1815, vol. i. ch. iv. p. 56, n. 
 
26 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 civic features. Thus they are applied to unsettled 
 prairies, or the wilderness, where territorial lines are not 
 fixed by ranges of hills or the course of streams, but are 
 run with compass and chain. As the territory they de- 
 signate becomes settled, and the region beyond is better 
 known, they journey on with the pioneers. In less than 
 a hundred years the West has migrated from Western 
 New York to Michigan, to Illinois, to Wisconsin ; and, 
 while the West has been the settled country, the Far 
 West, ever moving on, has marked the parts beyond. 
 
 These phrases are apt to become popular names for 
 large regions having many subdivisions, as seen in the 
 phrase — "the South." Usually they point out some 
 locality more remote than that adjoining the one in 
 which they are used. They exclude, as well as include. 
 The West and the Far West do not cross the Rocky 
 IMountains. California and Oregon are known by their 
 proper names. 
 
 The locality they describe need not be exactly in the 
 line the word points out. In the same place their mean- 
 ing often differs in different periods of time ; and it 
 differs in places not very remote. In the city of New 
 York, the East means the eastern part of New England. 
 In Boston and its vicinity " Down East " is the familiar, 
 colloquial name for the State of Maine ; yet east of 
 Massachusetts is the ocean, and Maine, with its vast 
 area of thirty thousand square miles, lies to the north- 
 east. As the road from Judea to the East at first ran 
 due north, shunning the Desert on its right, so does the 
 road from Massachusetts to the East, avoiding the sea. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 27 
 
 It traverses part of the State of New Hampshire ; but to 
 this, the name of the East is never given ; and the name 
 never crosses the line of the British Provinces, eastward 
 of Maine. Throughout a territory large as that of 
 Judea, and containing as large a population, it is the 
 local, idiomatic, common name for a restricted, definite, 
 yet extensive region ; and, in this, it is precisely like 
 St. Matthew's term — the East. 
 
 These are phrases of the air, rather than of the earth ; 
 yet they are ever used much in the same way. Once 
 the East of the Romans was Asia Minor, with its many 
 provinces. As their dominion widened, it journeyed 
 with it. In the Augustan age, the East was used in a 
 restricted, definite sense, as the Latin name for Syria. 
 Then it came to point, at times, to Parthia ; but, un- 
 less the known world to the eastward was manifestly 
 meant, it excluded India ; and the countries it denoted, 
 at different times, all lay to the south-east of Rome. 
 
 As bearing on the Hebraic use of such phrases, the 
 main fact noted is this : — though in the same place 
 their meaning may differ in different periods, they may 
 have as definite a geographical meaning as any names 
 can have, and, when we put ourselves in the circum- 
 stances of those using them, their use seems natural, 
 their meaning sure. The conclusion, then, is, that St. 
 Matthew's terms can have a restricted, definite geo- 
 graphical meaning. 
 
 That they do not, is a notion upheld by the conjecture, 
 that he chose a term which left the country of the pilgrims 
 in doubt, because he did not know w^hat country it was. 
 
28 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 But the conjecture, here, should be the exact opposite of 
 this ; for, most assuredly, the fact, supposed unknown 
 to St. Matthew, was, at the time of the pilgrimage, so 
 well known to all Jerusalem, it was a fact of so much 
 interest, so easy to remember and so hard to forget, 
 that there is every reason to think it must have been a 
 part of the history, from whatever source it came to the 
 Evangelist. 
 
 More than this. To be complete, this explanation 
 of St. Matthew's terms must include the words he puts 
 into the lips of the Magi ; but, then, part of their lan- 
 guage becomes inexplicable. They say, the Star was 
 seen by them when they were in the East. Now, they 
 could not have forgotten where they first saw the Star, 
 and it is not possible to give any reason why they should 
 have wished to conceal this in vaofue lanoruasfc. In what 
 particular city, or town, or village they were, when the 
 Star first shone, was of no consequence. If they stated 
 this, it may not have reached their historian, or might not 
 reappear in his condensed statement ; but the name 
 they gave to the country where they were when they 
 saw it — assuredly, this was a definite name. 
 
 At the outset in tliis inquiry, then, these facts are es- 
 tablished ; — the two Geographical terms in the narrative 
 may have a restricted, definite meaning — one, probably, 
 the other, certainly, has ; and it will hereafter appear, 
 that, if the meaning of tlie latter is determined, the 
 meaning of the former at once becomes definite and 
 clear. 
 
 St. Mattliew's words arc of the place ; and he who 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 29 
 
 would know what they mean, must look for the East and 
 the Far East with the eye of a Hebrew in Palestine. 
 The country east of Palestine lies more than a thousand 
 leagues away ; but its great features are so simple and 
 unvarying in their vastness, that it is possible to bring 
 them before the mind's eye, with a clearness sufficient 
 for this purpose, even without the aid of the map. Be- 
 yond the Jordan there is a high ridge of land that forms 
 tlie purple background of every eastern prospect from 
 Jerusalem, and, indeed, from all of Western Palestine.^ 
 Everywhere of much the same height, running north 
 and south, parallel with the Jordan and with the sea of 
 Sodom, it is one and the same range, whether known as 
 the heights of Moab, of Ammon, or of Gilead. Let us 
 suppose ourselves standing anywhere upon these hills, 
 
 ^ " Who that has ever travelled in Palestine has not 
 longed to cross the Jordan valley to those mysterious hills, 
 which close every eastward view with their long horizontal 
 outline, their overshadowing height, their deep purple shade ? " 
 — Stanley's Egypt and Palestine, chap. viii. sec. 1. 
 
 " The view looking back on Bethlehem, as you ascend the 
 northern hills, is exceedingly beautiful ; to the east it is 
 bounded by the long, unbroken ridge of the mountains of 
 Moab." — Lord Lindsay, letter iii. p. 242. 
 
 '' As seen from Mount Olivet, the eastern mountains 
 stretch off in a long, even ridge, apparently unbroken. They 
 present to the view no single peak or separate summit." 
 — Robinson, vol. i. sec. 6, p. 236. 
 
 Stanley says, '' I was not prepared for their constant 
 intermino-lin'y with the views of Jerusalem itself. From al- 
 most every point there was visible that long, purple wall, ris- 
 ing out of its unfathomable depths." — Chap. iii. sec. 3, p. 166.. 
 
30 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 and srazins: towards where the sun rises. As, from 
 some headhmd, we look out far over the sea, till the 
 level line of the waters is lost in the horizon, so here, 
 we look out upon an expanse, undulating only as the 
 sea when the winds sleep. For six hundred miles to 
 the eastward it is one unbroken level, — even from 
 these Syrian hills to the Persian hills. But, in this vast 
 plain, there is a division that is to be remarked and re- 
 membered. That part of it farthest from us is fertilized 
 by two rivers ; that part before us is a waterless desert. 
 Of the Great Sand Ocean of the world, known in 
 Africa as the Zahara, in Asia as Arabia, through which 
 the Nile marks a line of green, out of which the pin- 
 nacles of Sinai rise, and into which the high land of 
 Palestine sinks down on the South and on the East, 
 the expanse before us is the north-eastern Gulf. To the 
 north-east of us, this sandy waste narrows to a point 
 between the continuance of the ridge we stand upon and 
 the upper waters of the Euphrates ; which river, from 
 that point, puts a limit to this desert country. From 
 the adjacent Syria, the region before us, and, especially, 
 more to the north-east, where it terminates in a grassy 
 plain, is sometimes called the Syrian Desert ; but all 
 geographers hold it to be an offshoot of Arabia.^ And 
 
 ^ *' A line drawn from the head of the Persian Gulf to the 
 head of the Arabian Gulf would seem the natural boundary 
 of Arabia were it not for the vast desert which stretches to 
 the uortliward, and is of a character so decidedly Arabian, 
 that it has always been referred to that part of Asia. . . . 
 
 "The remainder of Arabia consists of that outer portion, 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 31 
 
 it is the very Arabia of our imagination. Nowhere are 
 the strange features of that peculiar country better seen. 
 There sunburnt Arabs only roam. In that great and 
 terrible wilderness the sand-storm rises, the deadly si- 
 moom blows. ^ No road ever did or ever will cross its 
 shifting sands. The only traveller that ever passed 
 through it was Nebuchadnezzar, who, hearing in Pales- 
 tine that his father was dead in Babylon, and fearing 
 what might chance were he long absent from his capital, 
 sent his captives and his army north, to shun this desert 
 on their right, and thence circuitously home ; while, 
 with a few guards, Arab guides, and swift dromedaries, 
 he struck straiglit across this pathless desert.^ 
 
 which, in the form of a triangle, extends along the border 
 of Palestine and Syria, and the course of the Euphrates. In 
 its central parts, this is the most completely desert tract of 
 all Arabia." — Murray's Encyclopedia of Geography, part 
 iii. b. ii. ch. iii. sec. 1. 
 
 ^ In this desert " sand-storms are frequent, and, at times, 
 the baleful simoom sweeps across the entire tract, destroying 
 with its pestilential breath both men and animals." — Raw- 
 linson's Five Monarchies, vol. i. ch. i. p. 32. 
 
 ^ " Having committed to certain of his friends the con- 
 veyance to Babylon of the captive Jews, Phoenicians, and 
 those of the Egyptian nations, together with the bulk of his 
 army, its ammunitions and provisions, he went himself 
 liastily, accompanied with a few others, over the desert, and 
 came to Babylon." — Part of a fragment of the Chaldean 
 History of Bcrosus, preserved in Josephus, Antiq. b. x. 
 ch.xi. 1. The Avhole reads somewhat like a summary of 
 the exploits of Nebuchadnezzar ; and it is placed by 
 Josephus after his own mention of the life and death of 
 that monarch. 
 
32 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 There are few contrasts on the earth's surface more 
 striking than that between this sandy waste and the 
 fertile land beyond — a contrast owing to the absence 
 of the water element from the one, and its presence in 
 the other, where the broad flowing Euphrates furrows 
 the plain, and the swift Tigris ^ hurries on to mingle its 
 waters with those of the Euphrates. Flowing from 
 fountains near together in Armenia far to the north- 
 east of us, these rivers seek, at first, the Mediterranean 
 and Caspian Seas, but checked by mountain ranges in 
 their westward and eastward windings, they bend south- 
 ward, pour their life-giving waters through the eastern 
 part of this flat country between Syria and Persia, and 
 make that portion of it almost as fertile as the land of 
 Egypt. 
 
 The Plain of the Two Kivers begins at the base of the 
 Armenian highlands, and runs from thence south-east- 
 ward, nearly seven hundred miles, to the Persian Gulf. 
 The northern half of it is a fine tract of land, though 
 some small part of it is sterile, if not desert.^ Its 
 north-western section is diversified by spurs from the 
 mountains ; and a little below its centre, it is almost 
 crossed, east and west, by a low, narrow, steep lime- 
 stone ridge, called the Sinjar Hills. The Highlands, 
 
 ^ Philo Judaeus has this curious remark : " The Tigris is 
 a very cruel and mischievous river ; and so the Magi bear 
 witness, who have found it to be of a character quite different 
 irom the nature of other rivers." — Questions and Answers, 
 No. 13. 
 
 ^ Hence Xenophon called this part of it Ai-abia, — "a plain 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 33 
 
 together with a part of the Plain, ^ were known to an- 
 cient geographers, as Mesopotamia.^ 
 
 The southern half of the Plain is about three hun- 
 dred miles in len^^rth, with an averao^e breadth of about 
 one hundred miles. Its level surface is broken only by 
 frequent mounds that mark where temples or cities 
 stood. Its alluvial soil is of inexhaustible fertility. 
 This southern half of the Plain was known as Baby- 
 lonia. It lies due east from the Holy Land. 
 
 Beyond the Tigris soon rise the ranges of the Zagros 
 of old, now of Kurdistan — the first mountains east- 
 ward of us. These are the outposts of the elevated 
 Plateau of ancient Persia, that stretches far towards 
 the rising sun. Eastward of us, then, there are three 
 well defined regions — the Desert, the Southern Plain 
 of the two rivers, and Persia. So little of the world 
 beyond these was known to the Hebrews, that we have 
 only these three to consider in determining what region 
 they called the East, and what the Far East. 
 
 One fact, very important to our inquiry, clearly ap- 
 
 even as the sea, and full of wormwood ; if any other kind 
 of shrubs or reeds grow there, they all had an aromatic 
 smell, but no trees were seen." — Anabasis, b. i. 5. 
 
 ^ Whose southern limit may be said to have been where a 
 rampart, called the Median Wall, crossed nearly from river 
 to river, from about 34° north latitude on the Tigris, to 33^ 
 30', on the Euphrates. 
 
 ^ The literal meaning of Mesopotamia is, " between the 
 
 rivers." Rawlinson, in his Five Monarchies, vol. i. eh. i., 
 
 gives to the word this vast compass. So too in Smith's 
 
 Diet., Art. *' Mesopotamia," if we look to the name, he 
 
 3 
 
34 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 pears from the Scriptures of the Hebrews. They were 
 always familiar with the use of the phrase " the East " in 
 a restricted, definite, geographical sense. The geo- 
 graphical meaning of the term very naturally differed 
 in different periods of their long life of fifteen hundred 
 years in Palestine. To trace out these differences, may 
 be neither useless nor uninteresting to those who would 
 intelligently read the ancient records of our holy re- 
 ligion. 
 
 The Israelite named the four quarters of the world 
 from their position relative to himself, as he stood facing 
 eastward. These names are all found in this verse of 
 
 says, " We must regard Mesopotamia as the entire coun- 
 try between the rivers." He describes all this, but then 
 says, " it seems proper to append a more particular ac- 
 count of that region vvliich bears the name, par excellence^ 
 both in Scripture and in classical writers." Of this he makes 
 the Sinjar Hills the southern limits ; and refers to Ptolem. 
 Geograph., v. 18; Strabo, ii. 1, 29 ; Arrian, iii. 7. 
 
 To Aram-naharim, which is Mesopotamia in the Greek 
 translation of the Hebrew Scriptures, he has to give the 
 same vast compass. But the literal meaning of this is " the 
 highlands of the rivers ; " and all the places located in this 
 tract were in the uplands. Gen. xxiv. 10 ; Deut. xxiii. 4 ; 
 Judges iii. 8-10. With time, it no doubt lost its descrip- 
 tive meaning, and was used as a proper name ; but there is 
 no probability that it was ever extended clear down to the 
 gulf, a distance of seven hundred miles from the highlands. 
 As the mountaineers came to possess some portion of the 
 plain, the name given to their country woukl embrace such 
 a section of it ; and this would explain the rendering it iu 
 Greek by Mesopotamia. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAK EAST. 35 
 
 the book of Job : ^ " I go forward, — (Kedem, before 
 — to the East), but he is not there; and backward (to 
 the West) , but I cannot perceive Him ; on the left 
 hand (to the North), where he doth work, but I cannot 
 behold Him ; He hideth himself on the right hand (to 
 the South), that I cannot see Him." 
 
 It was almost inevitable, that at first the Israelite 
 should give the name Kedem (before), the East, to 
 the vast area of the desert, which, undiversified by 
 ranges of hills, or the course of streams, lay before 
 him as he looked eastward from the heights beyond the 
 River Jordan. This broad region had no civic or nat- 
 ural features from which to name it ; and Kedem, the 
 East, became its name, even in the days of the patri- 
 archs. Abraham sent the sons of his concubines 
 "eastward into the east country ; "^ that is, far into the 
 desert. 
 
 The East 'was, then, the country of wandering Arabs ; 
 and, in times earlier than the civic splendors beyond the 
 Euphrates, the Arabs were found on the farther side of 
 that river. Those irrepressible wanderers of the desert 
 would get out of their bounds. With their hand 
 against every man, they ever loved to make raids to the 
 west, over the Jordan, into the green plain of Esdra- 
 elon ; and to make raids to the east, over the Euphrates, 
 into the garden beyond. They did so when tlie coun- 
 try on either side of their sands w^as thinly peopled ; 
 
 ^ Job xxiii. 8 J 9. ? Gen. xxv. 6.. 
 
36 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 and they do so now, when the strength of Syria and of 
 Assyria is alike decayed. The depth of the solitude 
 that was to be in Babylon was painted by this touch, — 
 " the Arabian shall not pitch his tent there ; " ^ even the 
 wild-eyed Bedouins, who, unhindered and unharmed, 
 will cross the Euphrates, shall shun the haunted mound 
 of Babylon. 
 
 The country of wandering tribes being then the 
 East, with them the phrase, at times, crossed the Eu- 
 phrates. Hence the kinsmen of Abraham, who seem 
 to have dwelt permanently on the farther side of that 
 river in tents, are called "children of the East."^ 
 
 The use in Jacob's family of the East, for the desert, 
 continued in the land of Egypt, because the Arabian 
 desert, that bordered Canaan on the east and on the 
 south, also bordered Egypt on the east. Thus the 
 Israelites carried down with them into Egypt the name 
 of the East for the desert, kept it while there, and 
 brousrht it back with them. Alike in Goshen, and in 
 Canaan, this name for the desert answered to various 
 conditions in which phrases taken from the quarters of 
 the horizon are used geographically. It was one vast, 
 monotonous expanse in which there were no cities, no 
 
 ^ Isaiah xiii. 20. 
 
 2 Gen. xxix. 1 ; English version — people. Balaam, also, 
 standing on the hill of Moab, says he came there from the 
 mountains of the east. Pethor, Balaam's town, was by the 
 Euphrates ; but he may have used tlie term so casually, 
 that no geographical usage can be inferred from it. Num. 
 xxiii. 7 ; xxii. 5 ; Deut. xxiii. 4. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 37 
 
 hills, no rivers. It had divitiions well known within the 
 black hair-tents of the Arabs ; but to the land-tilling 
 Israelites, they had as little of difference as their tribes, 
 whom they grouped together as "children of the 
 East."^ The Israelites dwelt four hundred years and 
 more in Egypt ; for the time of one generation they 
 wandered in the desert to the east of Egypt, and south 
 of Canaan ; and when they came up out of it into 
 Canaan, they could have had little knowledge of the 
 same desert, as it stretched far eastward of the Holy 
 Land. But two tribes and a half loved the free life of 
 herdsmen better than fenced cities or ploughed fields, 
 and would dwell beyond Jordan in tents. ^ Under the 
 grand old oaks of that high table land, and over its rich 
 pastures, fed their "very great multitude of cattle," ' 
 and down its eastern slope into the plain, till the pas- 
 ture dried up into the wilderness. The two tribes and 
 a half soon knew the desert before them ; for between 
 them and their Arab kinsmen there was no great un- 
 likeness of manners or of lang^uasfe.^ 
 
 ^ Judges vi. 7, 8, 33 ; vii. 12. In the wandering, the Is- 
 raelites became well acquainted with the Amalekites and 
 the Midianites ; and, hence, the sacred writers, though once 
 (Judges viii. 10) calling them children of the East, give 
 them their own names — illustrating how general are super- 
 seded by proper names. 
 
 ^ Joshua xxii. 7, 8. 
 
 ^ Num. xxxii. 1. 
 
 * Gideon's venturing by night in among the host " of the 
 Midianites, and the Amalekites, and all the children of the 
 East," to " hear what they say," seems to prove that the 
 
38 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 In after years, when the galleys of King Solomon 
 liad rowed down the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean 
 and up the Persian Gulf, the whole of the great Ara- 
 bian Desert was known to the children of Israel. We 
 have seen that imperfect knowledge of a country is 
 usually one of the conditions of the geographical use 
 of the phrases, the East, the West, the North, and the 
 South ; and, as knowledge of the country to which 
 such a name is given increases, this general name often 
 gives place to a more specific one. It is in harmony 
 with this that, when the desert became known to 
 Israel in all its length and breadth, it received a proper 
 name. In the book of the Kings it is called Arabia,^ 
 — a name unknown to earlier Scripture, and perhaps 
 coming from the people beyond the Euphrates ; and 
 it is called so by Isaiah,^ Ezekiel,^ Jeremiah,* and 
 Nehemiah ;* in the book of Chronicles ; ^ in the books of 
 the Maccabees,^ and in the New Testament.^ 
 
 The old name gave place to the new for these reasons 
 also : all Arabia is so like itself, and so unlike any 
 other country; the Arabs, so like themselves and so 
 unlike any other people, that Arabia can have but one 
 name with those acquainted with it. When looked 
 at as a whole, it seems to lie to the south of Palestine ; 
 
 Israelites then could understand the speech of the desert- 
 tribes. — Judges vii. 9-15. 
 
 ^ 1 Kings X. 15. ^Neh. iv. 7. 
 
 2 Isa. xxi. 13. « 2 Chron. ix. 14. 
 
 ^ Ezok. xxvii. 21. ^ 2 Mace. xii. 2. 
 
 "^ Jer. iii. 2. ^ Acts ii. 11. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 39 
 
 in St. Matthew's Gospel, the Queen of Sheba is the 
 Queen of the South ^ — and this complete view of it for- 
 bade calling part of it the East. 
 
 Thus, the old name for the desert would not long 
 dwell side by side with its new name ; '^ and about the 
 time of this chansfe, new relations beo^an between the 
 Hebrews and nations rising to power beyond the desert, 
 which make it probable that the name "the East" would 
 journey farther onwards, and cross the Euphrates into 
 Babylonia.^ 
 
 As said before, it is natural for Asiatics to use "the 
 East," and its kindred phrases, geographically, and, 
 though the territory of the Hebrews was small, and 
 on the edge of Asia, their Scriptures abundantly illus- 
 
 ^ Matt. xii. 42. 
 
 2 It might for a time. See Isaiah xi. 14 ; Jeremiah 
 xlix. 28. 
 
 ^ As I end this inquiry as to the oldest Hebrew use of the 
 phrase " the East," I would note a fact that bears upon 
 the authenticity of the books of Moses. Gen. x. 26-30, 
 gives the lineage and locality of some of the chief tribes of 
 Arabia. The dweUiug-place of Sheba, Havilah, Ophir, and 
 others, is " from Mesha," — near the present Mocha, — " as 
 thou goest unto Sepha, a mount of the East," — highlands 
 running from near Mecca and Medina across the peninsula. 
 Now "the East" would not have been used in that way by 
 one writing in Palestine. It might have been by one in 
 the desert south of it. And the whole passage seems to 
 hint at " the wisdom of the Egyptians," or at a knowledge 
 of the Arabian peninsula gained from the Arabs of Midian. 
 
 In this place alone the article is prefixed to Kedem — the 
 East — just as it is to the second form of Anatole, in the 
 Hebraized Greek of St. Matthew, ch. ii. 2. 
 
40 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 trate and confirm this. While they were comparatively 
 isolated from the rest of the world this appears, and 
 still more clearly afterwards. As the exile drew nigh, 
 Assyria became "the North," and upon this, Babylonia 
 would very naturally become " the East." 
 
 Assyria lay not so far north as east, and the latitude 
 of the phrase is such that it might have been called the 
 East ; but the Hebrew prophets looked upon it as a 
 northern power. Its direction admitted of this ; and 
 the first appearing of the Assyrian in Palestine was 
 always from that quarter. He never invaded Judea 
 directly from the east, because on that side it was 
 protected by the desert. To avoid this, he crossed over 
 to Damascus — as did the Chaldean after him. Thence 
 he came down the upper valley of the Jordan, and, as 
 he marched southwards, kept that river on his left. 
 Had he moved down on the east bank of the river, 
 when he came to a point on a line with Jerusalem, 
 there would have been in front of him, as he faced 
 towards the city, the wide valley of the Jordan sunk 
 below the level of the ocean, and, in a military point 
 of view, a sort of natural fosse, that made Judea almost 
 unassailable from that quarter. Hence the prophets 
 looked to the northern hills of their own land when 
 they saw the war-storm rolling down on Zion. In 
 Isaiah's vision of the approach of the army of Sen- 
 nacherib, those hills are nigh to the Holy City. Over 
 the heights and tlu'ough the strong passes of warlike 
 Benjamin the heathen comes, until his last stand is on 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 41 
 
 the Mount of Olives, whence he "shakes his hand 
 airainst the mount of the daughter of Zion, the hill of 
 Jerusalem."^ So, too, in the clarion-call of the prophet 
 Jeremiah to the most valiant of the tribes: "O, ye 
 children of Benjamin, gather yourselves to flee out of 
 the midst of Jerusalem, and blow the trumpet in Tekoa, 
 and set up a sign of fire in Beth-haccerem, for evil ap- 
 peareth out of the North." '^ 
 
 Besides this, the invader could not threaten Israel 
 till he had first reduced the kingdoms northward of it 
 to his imperial rule ; and the armies of his subject allies 
 marched with his, when 
 
 " The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold, 
 And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold, 
 And the sheen of his spears was like stars on the sea, 
 When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee." 
 
 " Assur came out of the mountains from the North ; he 
 came with ten thousands of his army ; the multitude 
 whereof stopped the torrents, and their horsemen have 
 covered the hills." ^ Of the Assyrian Empire, as em- 
 bodied in its vast and varied host, the later prophets and 
 writers of Israel spake, even as they did when they said 
 of the seat of its dominion, the Lord "will stretch 
 out his hand against the North and destroy Assyria, 
 and make Nineveh a desolation."* But, when a still 
 more awful storm of war gathered fiir off in the same 
 
 1 See Robinson, vol. i. sec. 9, p. 463. Stanley, ch. iv. 
 sec. 1. Isaiah x. 32. 
 
 2 Jer. vi. 1. ^ Judith xvi. 4. * Zeph. ii. 13. 
 
42 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 quarter of the horizon, but to the South of the seat of 
 the Assyrian power, the Country whence its overshad- 
 owing arose, darkening all the west, must have been 
 known as the East.^ 
 
 ^ It is closely to be considered when, where, by whom, 
 and for whom, such phrases are used. Not only the As- 
 syrian Empire, but the Babyloniau also, is spoken of by the 
 prophets as the North, — as in Jer. i. 13, 14, 15 ; vi. 22 ; x. 
 22; Isaiah xiv. 13, — and it is not always easy to tell to 
 which the term refers. The latter usage had its root in the 
 former, and did not conflict with the use of " the East" for 
 Babylonia. It is the Babylonian Empire that absorbed into 
 itself the Assyrian, which is pictured as a northern power ; 
 and the explanations given of this usage as to Assyria, ex- 
 cept the first, apply here, especially the allusion in the term 
 to those kingdoms to the northward of Palestine, that were 
 subject to tiie Empire of the Chaldees, — as appears from 
 these Scriptures : " 1 will send and take all the families of the 
 North, saith the Lord, and Nebuchadnezzar, the King of Bab- 
 ylon, my servant, and will bring them against this land, and 
 against the inhabitants thereof;" — Jer. xxv. 9. "Nebu- 
 chadnezzar, King of Babylon, and all his army, and all the 
 kingdoms of the earth of his dominion, and all the people, 
 fought against Jerusalem;" — Jer. xxxiv. 1. "Behold, 
 I will bring upon Tyrus, Nebuchadnezzar, King of Babylon, 
 a king of kings, from the North, with horses and chariots, 
 and with horsemen and companies, and much people. " — 
 Ezekiel xxvi. 7. Here, as bel'ore, the seat of his dominion 
 is named, and then the words "from the North" point to his 
 war-path, when, with his northern allies, he comes down 
 upon Tyre. 
 
 Jeremiah (eh. xlvi. 20, 24), addressing Egypt, calls the 
 Babylonian Empire, as if seen from her stand-point, the 
 North, and with allusion also to the coming down of its army 
 through Syria. He also speaks of the defeat of the Egyp- 
 
THE EAST AKD THE FAR EAST. 43 
 
 Thus, as the roll of ancient Scripture was closing, 
 Babylon "of the Chaldees,"! — "that bitter and hasty 
 nation . . . their horses swifter than the leopards, and more 
 fierce than the evening wolves,"^ — became the terror 
 of the world ; and the East, ceasing to be the name for 
 the Desert, came to mean the new and terrible Dominion 
 beyond the "Great River." Ezekiel, prophesying the 
 ruin of the Ammonites, in more ancient Scripture them- 
 selves "the children of the East," says they shall be 
 destroyed by " the children of the East " — meaning the 
 Chaldeans.^ Isaiah, referring to the superstitions and 
 sins of Babylonish heathenism, reproaches "the house 
 of Jacob " with beinsj full of the sorceries of " the 
 
 tians at Carchemish, on the Euphrates, as ia the North 
 country, which it might be called, as looked upon either 
 from Memphis or Jerusalem. Memphis, N. lat. 29° 56'; 
 Jerusalem, 31° 49'; Carchemish, 35° 15'. 
 
 There are several other applications of this phrase. " The 
 princes of the North," Ezekiel xxxii. 80, mast be the 
 Tyrians, as they are named with the Sidoniaus, and the 
 ground of this usage is plain from the map. In Jeremiah, 
 ch. 1. 2, 3, 9, 41, the people who arc to come from the 
 North against Babylon, are the Medes, part of whose terri- 
 tory lay to the northward of that city. 
 
 ^ Isaiah xiii. 19. 
 
 2 Hab. i. 6, 8. 
 
 ^ Ezek. XXV. 3, 4, 5, 10. This prophecy is one of a 
 series that includes all the Arab tribes who rejoiced in the 
 ruin of the Hebrew nation, and its fulfilment, in part at 
 least, is recorded by Josephus, when he says, " In the fifth 
 year after the destruction of Jerusalem, Nebuchadnezzar 
 made war against the Ammonites and the Moabites, aud 
 brought those nations into subjection." — Autiq. x. 9, 7. 
 
44 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 East."^ To these evidences of this usage may be added 
 this verse : " Solomon's wisdom exceeded the wisdom 
 of all the children of the East Country, and all the wis- 
 dom of Egypt." ^ To refer this, as many have done, to 
 tlie wisdom of the desert, is unsatisfoctory indeed ; for 
 no especial wisdom can be attributed to the Arabs in or 
 before Solomon's time, and none in their own country 
 at any time. Besides this, the numerous preceding 
 allusions in Scripture to the Arabs, give them the char- 
 acter of wild marauders, dreaded by their more civilized 
 neighbors, the Israelites ; so that the ill-considered 
 notion, that this passage refers to them, is as repugnant 
 to Hebraic, as to general history. This interpretation* 
 then being rejected, it is plain, that, as in the verses 
 of Isaiah and Ezekiel just referred to, so here, "the 
 children of the East" mean the Babylonians. This 
 interpretation gives the tw^o clauses of the verse a well- 
 balanced significance, pronouncing the wisdom of Sol- 
 omon superior to that of the two great countries from 
 immemorial time renowned for learning.^ 
 
 ^ Isaiah ii. 6. ^ j j^i^og iv. 30. 
 
 ^ The astronomical records of the Babylonians were of 
 great antiquity — evidence enough of their early eminence 
 in learning. See, hereafter, page 110. The Hebrew annals 
 are silent as to the cities and kingdoms on the Euphrates and 
 Ti'H'is, — save notices in the book of Genesis, — until near 
 the close of the period of the Kings of Israel ; but tliis is 
 no sufficient evidence that, till then, the Israelites knew noth- 
 ing of them. The fact must have been otherwise, and there 
 are indications of this in the prophets. In the long com- 
 mercial reign of Solomon, the Israelites must have gained 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 45 
 
 Of the East as the phrase was thus used, on three 
 sides, the natural boundaries were well defined.^ On 
 the south it reached the Persian Gulf. The Euphrates 
 marked its nearer limit, and more effectually because it 
 was reached through a waterless desert. On its farther 
 side, were the mountains aloni? the left bank of the Tis^ris. 
 
 some knowledge of the East ; and there seems to be no good 
 reason why this verse might not have been written at the 
 close of Solomon's reign. This would carry much farther 
 back a usage found in Isaiah, but only to a period in which 
 it might have naturally originated. Besides this, the book 
 of the Kings is thought by some to have been compiled by 
 Jeremiah, who lived a little later than Isaiah. 
 
 In the interpretation, the choice is between the Arabs and 
 the Babylonians. The general sense of the " wisdom of the 
 eastern world " is forbidden by the restricting form of the 
 phrase. 
 
 The LXX. refer it to the dLQ/uloi ui'dooziot, — the wisdom of 
 the men of old, of the wise of ancient days, evidently from 
 the fact that Kedem, — which, primarily and literally, means 
 before^ — may have a time-sense, or a space-sense. The 
 rendering is ingenious, and its sense is grand ; but it pre- 
 supposes a late origin for the wisdom of Egypt, which ^vas 
 hoary with age in Abraham's day ; and it has found no favor 
 with modern scholars. Still, this far-fetched interpretation 
 has this value. It shows the LXX. thought the phrase 
 could not here point to the Arabs, as it often does in older 
 Scripture. 
 
 ^ In fact, on the north also the boundary was well defined. 
 The section of the Plain of the Two Rivers south of the 
 Median Wall (see note 1, p. 33), is alluvial, differing in this 
 from that north of it, which, also, is somewhat more elevated. 
 Below the wall, canals crossed from river to river, irrigating 
 the plain between them. 
 
46 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 A fitting theatre for great events ! Here, the Tower 
 of Babel rose, and here, in after times, was Baby- 
 lon. In this land of Shinar was the first gathering- 
 place of the sons of men. It was the oldest haunt 
 of Empire, and long the coveted prize of power. It 
 was the battle-plain of nations. Here the Assyrian 
 fought; here the Chaldean, the Mede, the Greek, the 
 Parthian, the Eoman. But it was not the abiding 
 dwelling-place appointed to any one people. It had no 
 natural centre. It had no lines of defence that could 
 be permanently held against the tribes of the mountains 
 and the desert. Its hot climate was so enervating, that 
 its abounding wealth became the booty of hardier races. 
 Nowhere were seen splendor and havoc in more vivid 
 chansre. Yet it was lonor the mart of the commerce of 
 Central and Western Asia, the commerce that built 
 up Palmyra in the AVaste, and Baalbec between the 
 ridges of Lebanon, a commerce, one of whose outlets 
 to the Mediterranean was along " the Way of the Sea " ^ 
 of Galilee, on whose busy western shore, which, in the 
 first century, was almost a continuous line of cities, 
 towns, and villages, St. Matthew must have often seen 
 the long, overladen files of the slow moving caravans 
 coming from " the East." 
 
 Before the Exile, the Jews had begun to call the 
 world-historic Babylonian Plain " the East ; " and St. 
 Matthew's term might, perhaps, be sufficiently ex- 
 plained as a lingering reminiscence of ancient usage ; but 
 
 ^ Isa. ix. 1 ; Matt. iv. 15. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 47 
 
 there is reason to think that, after the Exile, this use of 
 " the East " continued while the Jews lived in Palestine. 
 To estimate the probability of this, we must free our- 
 selves of the feeling we unconsciously attribute to 
 them, that all there was of interest in that country 
 centred in Babylon. As Babylon the Great is strange- 
 ly, and even mysteriously, withdrawn from our eyes, 
 the Plain, that was resplendent with the light of its 
 glory, seems all at once to become that darkened and 
 solitary waste that now answers ''so eloquently well" to 
 the prophecies of ancient days : " I will render to Baby- 
 lon, and to all the inhabitants of Chaldea, all their evil 
 that they have done in Zion : " ^ " Babylon shall be- 
 come heaps, ... an astonishment, . . , without an in- 
 habitant:"^ "her cities a desolation, ... a land where 
 no man dwelleth : " ^ "I will also make it a possession for 
 the bittern and pools of water ; and I will sweep it with 
 the besom of destruction, saith the Lord of hosts."* 
 
 But, with the Lord, a thousand years are as one day; 
 and centuries passed before the desolations his proph- 
 ets foresaw in vision, were seen by the eyes of men. 
 Zion v/as a ploughed field and Judea a waste, while 
 Babylonia continued to be populous and great. Even 
 with the sure decay of its mighty city, that coun- 
 try lost but little of its importance to the Jews. The 
 Persian, while he was the sovereign of Palestine, held 
 Babylon as one of his capitals. When his dominion 
 passed away, the noble city of Seleucia, at a distance 
 
 1 Jer. li. 24. ^ j^^^ ^^ 43^ 
 
 2 Jer. li. 37. ^ Isa. xiv. 23. 
 
4:8 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 of only forty-five miles from the site of Babylon, rose 
 in its stead. It was one of the thirty-five great cities 
 built by Seleucus, who became, after Alexander, the 
 Greek lord of Central Asia, and also ruled over Pal- 
 estine ; and it was the capital of the eastern part of his 
 wide dominions. " Seleucia contained a numerous Jew- 
 ish population, on whom Seleucus bestowed privileges 
 equal to those granted to his own countrymen."^ After 
 the Greek dominion in Asia had passed away, Seleucia, 
 girt with its strong walls, continued even into the sec- 
 ond century, in spite of the Parthian power, a free city, 
 with its own senate of three hundred members, ruling 
 over its six hundred thousand citizens.^ Ctesiphon, also 
 a vast city, and one of the capitals of the Parthian Em- 
 pire, was built close to it. As under the Persians, so 
 under the Greeks, down to the re-establishment of the 
 independence of the Hebrews by the Maccabees, it con- 
 tinued to be one of the chief seats of that royal author- 
 ity, which the Jews of Palestine obeyed. And it ever 
 had this of interest to them : it was the dwelling-place 
 of many of their countrymen, as many probably as the 
 population of Judea itself, for but a small part of the 
 Judean captives came back from thence to Palestine. 
 The larger part remained in the land of their exile, and 
 
 ^ Post-Biblical History of the Jews, vol. i. ch. iii. p. 110. 
 I would earnestly commend to all Christian scholars this 
 admirable treatise by the very learned Rabbi, the late Dr. 
 Raphall, as, in some respects, the best in our language. 
 
 ^ Gibbon, ch. viii. sec. 2. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 49 
 
 greatly increased in numbers there. ^ These Jews kept 
 up an annual intercourse with Palestine ; and messen- 
 gers were sent from Jerusalem into their country every 
 year to collect silver and gold for the temple.^ 
 
 ^ The language of Josephus is very strong — " The entire 
 body of the people of Israel remained." — Antiq. lib. x. 
 5, 2. Of the Jews of his own time, he says, " Not a few 
 ten thousands dwelt in Babylonia." — Antiq. lib. xv. iii. 1. 
 
 As to the question. Whether Babylon was inhabited in the 
 first century ? — from general considerations it seems to me 
 that it was. The Persians cherished the city. The Greeks 
 and the Parthiaus had no reason to destroy it, and there is no 
 evidence that they did. It was a great city, and it perished 
 not by the violence of man, but, as it was fitting, by the vis- 
 itation of God, dying a lingering death. The idea that 
 Seleucia was known as Babylon is in itself improbable, and 
 Plutarch names them together. — Life of Crassus. 
 
 The evidence of Josephus to the fact that Babylon was a 
 city in the time of Herod, is as strong as it can be. He says 
 that, early in his reign, Hyrcanus, the high priest, was taken 
 captive- by the Parthians, and that Phraates, the Parthian king, 
 "gave him a habitation at Babylon, where there were Jews in 
 great numbers." — Antiq. lib. xv. ii. 2. Also, that Herod 
 sent for Ananelus, an obscure priest of Babylon, and bestowed 
 on him the high priesthood. — Antiq. lib. xv. ii. 4. 
 
 ^ " Vast numbers of the Jews were scattered over every 
 city of Asia and Syria." — Philo, Ad Caium, sec. 33. See 
 also. Contra Flaccum, sec. 7. He says, " Babylon, and the 
 satrapies of the rich, adjacent districts have many Jewish 
 inhabitants," and that yearly, messengers were sent there to 
 collect silver and gold for the temple. — Ad Caium, sec. 31. 
 In Yonge's excellent version of Philo, in this passage, Philo's 
 language is that of St. Matthew : " Babylon and many 
 other satrapies of the East ; " but on comparing this with 
 4 
 
50 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 Ever after the Exile the Jews of* Palestine well knew 
 the country called by their prophets " the East ; " and so 
 one of the causes from which such usage is apt to pre- 
 vail, did not exist ; but there were others that did. 
 Geographically, that country is one ; and at the Christian 
 era, it was under one Parthian rule ; yet then, as now, 
 under one Turkish rule, it had many districts and many 
 petty rulers ; and these were then, as now, ever chan- 
 ging. And at the Christian era, the proper names that 
 had in former ages pertained to it, were out of date. 
 It had been called the land of Shinar,^ but that was 
 before the nations were. It had been called the land 
 of the Chaldeans,^ but their dominion had long passed 
 away. Babylon, eclipsed for centuries by the impe- 
 rial cities in its vicinity, could then have hardly given 
 its name to the province in that familiar speech, that so 
 readily reflects the changes of Empire. It is not prob- 
 able, then, that at the Christian era its common name in 
 Palestine was any one of its historical names of older and 
 different times. There is nothing to show that any 
 later historical " name had arisen ; and, from all the 
 circumstances, it is not probable ^ — even as none has 
 arisen since ; yet among the Jews of Palestine, it must 
 then have had some colloquial name. 
 
 the original, it will be found that the words " of the East" 
 are supplied by the translator. 
 
 ^ Gen. X. 10; xi. 2. 
 
 ^ Isa. xxiii. 13. Jer. xxv. 12. 
 
 ^ The peculiar fact, that the once imperial, and still very 
 great city of Seleucia, was independent of the Parthians, 
 must have stood in the way of this. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 51 
 
 The caravan that journeyed from the land of Shinar 
 to the Holy Land, bearing with it the golden vessels of 
 the Temple, that was to rise anew on the mountain of 
 Moriah, was made up of Israelites born in the great 
 Plain of the Euphrates. They reached the desolated 
 site of the city they were to build again, by a circui- 
 tous route, coming down upon it — as the Assyrian and 
 the Chaldean before — from the North. But they well 
 knew that the land of their youthful memories lay 
 
 Eight against the eastern gate, 
 Where the great suu begins his state. 
 
 Their country was long governed from thence ; and 
 when this bond between it and them was broken, still 
 the children of the kinsmen they left behind came up 
 from thence to worship in Jerusalem, and whatever his- 
 torical names it may have had with them, it is very nat- 
 ural to suppose that in familiar household converse, this 
 land so often thought of, so often spoken of, was known 
 to them, as it was to their fathers in the generation pre- 
 ceding the Exile, by the local, idiomatic name of the 
 East.i 
 
 ^ The resemblance between this Hebrew usage, and the 
 use of the name " the East," as the popular name in 
 Massachusetts for the State of Maine, has been referred to 
 on p. 26. Down to the year 1820, Maine was united to 
 Massachusetts, and its legal title was the District of Maine ; 
 — a name not satisfactory, and not easy to speak. The 
 people are quick to catch up a new name, when one they 
 often use does not easily melt into the flow of speech. 
 Maine was settled in part from Massachusetts. Boston was 
 
52 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 Writers trained in the artificial rhetoric of the 
 schools, are inclined to reject colloquial phrases, as be- 
 neath the dignity of a learned style ; but the untram- 
 melled genius of St. Matthew was not thus hindered 
 from using household words — as when he wrote the 
 Holy City, for Jerusalem. St. Matthew chose words 
 most definite to himself and wrote naturally. Thus he 
 gave to Babylonia the name he was accustomed to give 
 to it in familiar converse, and which pointed it out 
 exactly to his countrymen. He might have used one 
 of its old scriptural names ; ^ but, when he was intro- 
 
 its commercial and political capital. Hence the phrase — so 
 common in such cases — up to Boston; and the peculiar, 
 invariable form of the phrase — " down East.'* 
 
 My first faint impression that St. Matthew's term was a 
 local idiom, with a restricted and definite geographical 
 meaning, may unconsciously have come from this usage ; 
 for I was familiar with it in my youth, hearing it ten 
 times where I heard the word Maine once. Thus, — "the 
 family has moved down East," or, " he lives," or " has gone 
 down East." So, too, the first railroad from Massachusetts 
 to Maine was " the Eastern Railroad ; " Avhile it was the 
 second that was called " the Boston and Maine." 
 
 As bearing on a line of thought in the Appendix to this 
 chapter, it may be well to add, that although this usage, 
 having been long established, is generally understood in the 
 United States, it is strictly a local idiom of a section, only, 
 of New England. 
 
 ^ Had he called it the land of the Chaldeans, it would 
 have tended to confound the Magi with a learned class 
 addicted to astrology, and known as Chaldeans ; and this 
 name was obsolete in his time. St. Stephen used it (Acts 
 vii. 4), but as both Philo, De Abrah., sec. 17, and Josephus, 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 53 
 
 ducing the pilgrim strangers as Persians, he did not 
 desire to recall any of the historical reminiscences asso- 
 ciated with them; and so, the name he did use — the 
 East — was in every way suited to his purpose. 
 
 This term, — the East, — then, is not general or 
 vague. It means that country which in the common 
 speech of man, will be ever known as Babylonia; 
 for, by every geographical and historical consideration, 
 in the first century, this country answers, beyond all 
 reasonable doubt, to the name — the East — on the lips 
 of a Hebrew in Palestine. Thus, the Magi tell us, 
 that the Star of the Lord was first known by human 
 eyes in the land of Shinar, where its earliest beams 
 shone serenely down on the vanishing splendors of the 
 mighty and mystic Babylon. 
 
 Having determined what is meant in St. Matthew by 
 the East, it will not be difficult, nor detain us long, to 
 determine what is meant by the Far East. For, how- 
 ever vague this term may seem in itself, by its relation 
 here to the term — the East — its meaning was clear to 
 the Jews of Palestine, through their acquaintance with 
 the eastern world ; and it becomes so to all, on looking 
 at tlie map of Western Asia. 
 
 Again, let us stand on the highlands beyond the 
 Jordan, and look out over the Great Plain, in part a 
 desert, in. part the garden of Asia. As these highlands 
 
 Antiq. i. vii. 1, contrast the wisdom of Abraham with the 
 philosophy of the Chaldeans, the same thought may have 
 led to his allusion to Abraham as dwelling in the land of 
 the Chaldeans, and the antiquated name was in keeping 
 with his biblical argument. 
 
54 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 overlook tliis Plain on this side, so, on the other, do 
 the mountains that rise from the High Plateau of Persia 
 beyond, which must be the Far East of the Evangelist. 
 It lies very directly in the line indicated, not widening 
 much to the south, because of the Persian Gulf and 
 the Indian Ocean ; nor to the north, because of the 
 Caspian Sea and its inhospitable eastern shore. The 
 separation between it and the East is clearly defined. 
 And the term cannot point farther on, for it must reach 
 its limit before it can pass the barren mountains and 
 trackless deserts in which Persia loses itself in that 
 direction, an almost impassable country, little known 
 in ancient or in modern days. 
 
 But the question here comes up. Why did not St. 
 Matthew use the proper geographical name, and say 
 Magi from Persia ? No geographical name would have 
 pointed out to those for whom he wrote, the "coun- 
 try of the Magi," more clearly than his familiar name, 
 the Far East — especially as here used in connection 
 with the East ; and it was the best name he could use. 
 That Aryan race of Persians and Medes, known to us 
 by the name of the former only, who, in all historic 
 time, have constituted the great majority of the people 
 of that country known to us as Persia, have always 
 called that country Iran, that is the Aryan land.^ 
 
 ^ " The appellation of Persia is unknown to its inhabit- 
 ants, by whom that region of Asia is named Iran." — 
 Historical and Descriptive Account of Persia, by J. B, 
 Fraser, eh. i. p. 1. *^ Iran, which Europeans call Persia. 
 . . . Iran has from the most ancient times to the present 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 55 
 
 Through all its dynasties, Assyrian, Median, Persian, 
 Greek, Parthian, and Moslem, this name is appropriate 
 to it. Not so the name Persia, given to that country 
 by the Greeks, from the tribe ruling there when first 
 they became acquainted with it. The Persian sov- 
 ereio;ntv over it ceased three hundred years and more 
 before St. Matthew's time ; and, for two hundred years 
 and more, it had been ruled by the Parthians. The 
 Jews of Palestine were so familiar with these political 
 changes that, probably, ^ki^ name for that country in 
 classical Greek was not much used in their Oriental, 
 Hebraized dialect of that language, and may have meant 
 that part of it occupied by the Persians, Media being 
 joined with it to designate the whole country ^ 
 
 But, could he not have said — Magi of the Persians ? 
 No ; for, of the Aryan race, in the Aryan land, there 
 were two great families, the Medes and the Persians.^ 
 
 day been the term by which the Persians call their country." 
 — Malcolm, vol. i. p. 1, n. Compare Herodotus, ch. vii. 62. 
 " Anciently the Medes were called, by all nations, Aryans." 
 This word is sometimes written " Arians," as by Rawlinson ; 
 but its use in that form in ecclesiastical history makes the 
 form here given preferable. 
 
 ^ This was sometimes the case in the Old Testament, as 
 in Esther i. 3, 14 ; Dan. viii. 20. It is so also in the 
 Greek of the Apocrypha, as in 1 Esdras iii. 1, — "the 
 princes of Media and Persia." See note 2, p. 56. 
 
 ^ Parthia was but a district of Iran ; the Parthians were 
 rather barbarous and few, compared with the rest of its 
 population, and they did not impress their name on the 
 Aryan land. Thus, Josephus speaks of the Parthians and 
 of the King of the Parthians, not of Parthia. See Antiq., 
 
56 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 On the tomb of Darius the Great is written, '^I am an 
 Aryan, of Aryan descent ; a Persian, the son of a Per- 
 sian."^ In Syria, in the Evangelist's time, the distinc- 
 tion was still kept up ; ^ and he would have had to use 
 
 lib. xiii. eh. viii. 4; cli. xiv. 3; lib. xiv. ch. xiii., passim; 
 ch. vi. 2 ; ch. vii. 1 ; lib. xv. ch. ii. 1 ; ch. iii. 9. Had 
 the Evangelist called the strangers Parthians, he would have 
 obscured the very relations he wished to point out, by con- 
 necting them with a race with whom their relations were 
 those of government, and not of history or lineage. 
 
 * Journal of the Asiatic Society, vol. xi. 291-313 ; vol. 
 xii. App. xix.-xxi. 
 
 ^ Looking at this Aryan race from a stand-point far off, alike 
 in space and in time, we blend completely into one its two 
 great families, and call them Persians, as we call those 
 who fell at Thermopylse and those Macedonians who fol- 
 lowed Alexander, alike, Greeks. But the Jews recognized 
 the diiference. In their Scriptures, as in general history, 
 first, the Medes appear. Israel is captive in " the cities of 
 the Medes." — 2 Kings xvii. 6. In the prophets it is the 
 Medes, with whose name alone they were then acquainted, that 
 are first seen : " The Lord hath raised up the spirit of the 
 kings of the Medes" against Babylon. — Jer. li. 11, and 
 Isaiah xiii. 17. At length the other great family comes in 
 sight, and "the kingdom of Persia." — 2 Chron. xxxvi. 20. 
 But the distinction is not lost sight of. Darius is " the 
 Median," Cyrus "the Persian." — Daniel v. 31; vi. 28. 
 There are " the laws of the Persians and Medes,'* Es- 
 ther i. 19 ; " the seven princes of Persia and Media," i. 14 ; 
 and " the province of the Medes," Ezra vi. 2. The Persians 
 often gave their own name to the whole people and territory in 
 the days of their Empire ; but afterwards, as the Medes were 
 the most numerous and their territory the largest, they must 
 liave become at the last, as at the first, the more prominent 
 of the two. Generally, in the Apocrypha, the terms are 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAK EAST. 57 
 
 the word Persians in the narrower sense that King 
 Darius did, as excluding the Medes. This may have 
 been what he did not mean to do ; for the little evidence 
 there is on the subject goes to prove that the Order of 
 the Mairi belong^ed rather to the Median than to the 
 Persian branch of this Aryan family.^ It is probable 
 St. Matthew did not know whether the strangers be- 
 longed to the Median or the Persian branch ; and it was 
 quite immaterial. What he wished to do, was to point 
 out that they belonged to that Aryan race, of old the 
 benefactor of Israel. 
 
 In the Hebrew Scriptures the Far East twice means 
 Persia. There, Cyrus is " the Man from the Far East," ^ 
 and the Persian Eas^le is " the eao^le from the Far East." ^ 
 
 used as in the Scriptures. In the book of Tobit, it is all 
 Media ; in the book of Judith, it is said, " the Persians 
 quaked at her boldness, and the Medes were daunted by her 
 hardihood (xvi. 10) ; and it looks very much like confirma- 
 tion of what has just been said, when, in 2 Esdras i. 3, one is 
 spoken of as " a captive in the land of the Medes, in the 
 reign of Artaxerxes, King of the Persians." It accords with 
 this and shows how familiar, even to the last, the Jews in 
 Palestine were with the state of things in Persia, that, in 
 Acts ii. 9, where we might expect the name of the Persians, 
 St. Peter speaks of the " Parthians and the Medes." 
 
 ^Herodotus, ch. i. 101, says the Magi were a tribe of the 
 Medes. 
 
 ^Isa. xli. 2. 
 
 ^Isa. xlvi. 11; — "a ravenous bird." The eagle was 
 the emblem of Persia. — ^schylus, Persae, 205-210. Xeno- 
 phon says ^' the ensign of Cyrus was a golden eagle held 
 upon the top of a long lance. This remains the ensign of 
 the Persian king to this day." — Cyrop., vii. 1. 
 
58 THE EAST AXD THE FAR EAST. 
 
 This was in passages that brought vividly to mind the 
 relations of old between the Holy City and those kings 
 of Iran, who ordered the temple to be rebuilt at their 
 own cost, and prayers there to be said for the king and 
 the people of Persia forever,^ — relations the Evangelist 
 might well recall, as he told of the coming of Magi from 
 Persia to Jerusalem. 
 
 ^ Josephus, Antiq., lib. xi. eh. 2. 3 ; ch. 4. 9. ; ch. 5. 1. 
 
CHARACTER AND RELIGION 59 
 
 CHAPTER III. 
 
 CHARACTER AND RELIGION OF THE PERSIANS. 
 
 Since these things are so, light may be shed on this 
 Persian pilgrimage from the Character and Religion of 
 the Persians of old. But a common knowledge of these 
 — if I may judge by my own, when some years since I 
 began this inquiry — can hardly be assumed; and an 
 explanation of this pilgrimage must sketch them, in out- 
 line, at least. 
 
 Even this is not so easy. The time is far back. The 
 country far away. Its few ruinous monuments are like 
 rocks that, rising out of the sea, doubtfully point to the 
 bearino^ of mountain ranores, and the confioruration of 
 lands sunk in the waters. The light is obscure. The 
 guides not over trustworthy. I dare not despise aught 
 that may help me in trying to draw, as well as I can, 
 the portrait of the Persian of old. I will fill out my 
 conception of what the Persian was, from what he is 
 now. This I may rightly do ; for, in all the vicissitudes 
 of his history, he has had much the same characteristics. 
 
 The Persian is of the Caucasian type. His com- 
 plexion is rather dark ; his face oval ; his abundant hair 
 black, ancl fine of texture ; his forehead high; eyebrows 
 
60 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 arching and connected ; eyes large, brilliant, and dark ; 
 his features regular, serious, and calm ; lips thin ; chin 
 narrow ; beard flowing ; his chest broad ; limbs well- 
 proportioned ; hands and feet well-shaped ; his gait 
 erect and fine ; his walk graceful.^ Of old, as now, he 
 w^as fond of dress : — " the long and carefully curled 
 hair of the Persians is conspicuous on the sculptures of 
 Persepolis." '-^ Of old, as now, the Persian was fond 
 of show ; yet high-spirited and brave. Of old, as now, 
 he was luxurious in his feelings, and a lover of wine ; 
 yet hardy in his training, temperate in his food, patient 
 under privation, much in the open air, a horseman, and 
 given to sports of the field. Of old, as now, the Per- 
 sian was courtly, lively, quick-witted. He was social, 
 
 •^ " The Persians are more than good-looking, they are a 
 handsome race" (Malcolm's Sketches of Persia, ch. xii. 
 p. 126) ; " and fond of decorating their persons" (ch. xvii. 
 p. 229). But most of the people of the northern prov- 
 inces of Persia are of Tartar origin. Of such are the Persian 
 merchants seen in the bazaars of Constantinople. Of such 
 are most of the ruling class and the reigning family ; but in- 
 termarriage with Persians has bettered the physical pecu- 
 liarities of the Tartar race. Lady Shiel, wife of a British 
 minister at Teheran, the capital of Persia, in " Glimpses of 
 Life in Persia," says of one of the royal family, " She was 
 really lovely ; fair, with indescribable eyes, and a figure only 
 equalled by the chefs-d'oeuvre of Italian art." The same 
 beauty of form that now marks the pure Persian race is seen 
 on the old sculptures of Persepolis. 
 
 ^ Rawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ili. p. 424. The Persians 
 wore long hair. — Herodotus, book vi. sec. 19. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 61 
 
 convivial, pleased with himself, proud of his country,^ 
 — the Frenchman of the East.^ 
 
 On his lips, the poetry and extravagance of the East ; 
 yet sometimes with a simple grandeur of word. On 
 his tomb at Pasargadas, the founder of the Persian em- 
 pire recalls the founder of his family ; of his own deeds 
 he says nothing, — his name will call them up ; — "I 
 am Cyrus, the King, the Achaemenian." 
 
 Of old, with an immortal instinct that led him to keep 
 records and set up monuments, Cyrus the Great made 
 a decree ; the fourth king after him was petitioned 
 that search might be made for this ; and search was 
 made in "the house of rolls," and the "roll" of the 
 
 ^ " The Persians look upon themselves as greatly superior 
 to the rest of mankind." — Herodotus, book i. sec. 134. 
 
 ^ " I accord to the Persian all the politeness of manners, 
 and all the readiness and vivacity of wit that are wanting to 
 the Osmanli." — Vamberry's Travels in Central Asia, book 
 i. p. 22. Bishop Southgate contrasts their affability with 
 the reserve of the Turks (Tour in Armenia and Persia, 
 vol. ii. ch. i. p. 9, 10), and says, " the Persians are 
 certainly among the most accessible and polite people on 
 earth" (ch. ii. p. 18). Their resemblance to Frenchmen 
 strikes all travellers in Persia. It is, at least, curious that 
 this likeness reaches to skill in cookery — an art in which 
 Persian princesses are proud to display their success ; and 
 to a distaste for a seafaring life. Malcolm says, " The 
 natives of this place " — a small port on the Persian Gulf — 
 " are almost all of the Arab race, and fond of the sea ; a pro- 
 pensity the more remarkable, as it is in such strong contrast 
 with the disposition of the Persians, of whom all classes have 
 an unconquerable antipathy to that element." — Sketches, 
 ch. iii. p. 33. 
 
62 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 decree was found. ^ A steep rock, seventeen hundred 
 feet high, overhangs the thoroughf\ire between Baby- 
 lonia and Persia. On the smooth face of this rock- 
 tablet, three hundred feet above the ground, Darius the 
 Great ordered an image of himself to be sculptured, 
 erect, holding his bow, two of his officers of state be- 
 hind him, a rebel under his feet, nine others in bonds 
 before him, and, beneath, a record of the first five years 
 of his reiofn to be carved in three lano^uaones, — and 
 there the traveller beholds it now.^ 
 
 The palace of the Persian of old was the noblest pile , 
 his palace-hall, the largest ever built by regal policy 
 or pride, ^ — fitting the state of the sovereign, whom the 
 Greeks ever called "the Great King." The court of 
 the Persian of old was sublime, — shadowing forth his 
 conception of the court on high. 
 
 1 Ezra V. 6-17; vi. 1-13. 
 
 ^ This long rock-inscription at Behistun is in the Persian, 
 Babylonian, and Scythian languages. It was executed 
 (B. C. 515) by the command of Darius Hystaspes, fourth 
 monarch of the empire. A translation of it is given in 
 Bawlinson's Herodotus, vol. ii. p. 590, etc. 
 
 ^ The idea of the magnificence of the palaces of the Per- 
 sian kings given by the book of Esther, ch. i. 5, 6, is con- 
 firmed by the ruins of Persepolis. Ferguson, in a Treatise 
 on the Palaces of Nineveh and Persepolis, describing the 
 ruin now called the Hall of Xerxes, makes these state- 
 ments : *' The central hall alone covered more than forty 
 tliousand square feet, or, with its walls, fifty-five thousand 
 seven hundred ; its three porticos add forty-two thousand 
 five hundred feet to this, and, including the guard-rooms 
 (six thousand eight hundred), it makes a rectangle of about 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 63 
 
 With something of Asiatic indifference to the worth 
 of human life, the Persians of old were not cruel by na- 
 ture. With something of Oriental sensuality, they 
 
 three hundred feet by three hundred and fifty, or one hundred 
 and j&ve thonsand square feet. The great Hall of Karnac, 
 in Egypt, the most stupendous building of antiquity, covers, 
 internally, but fifty-eight thousand three hundred feet, and 
 with its walls and porticos only eighty-eight thousand eight 
 hundred. No cathedral in England, nor, indeed, in France 
 or Germany, covers so much ground ; that of Cologne comes 
 nearest to it — eighty-one thousand five hundred i'eet. Mi- 
 lan cathedral covers one hundred and seven thousand eight 
 hundred feet. He finds, or fancies some resemblance be- 
 tween this building and the Hall of Xerxes, in the general 
 character of the effect it must have produced upon the 
 spectator, and says, " Neither is quite satisfactory ; yet 
 the most rigid critic cannot deny that they produce a sensa- 
 tion of bewilderment and beauty wliich it is impossible to 
 resist, and, to most minds, they seem, and must have always 
 appeared to be among the noblest creations of human intel- 
 lect and human power." — Part i. sec. i. pp. 171-2. 
 
 He says, " I cannot conceive anything more gorgeous, 
 or, perhaps, much more beautiful, than such a building as 
 this must have appeared in the clear sunshine of a Persian 
 climate, if ornamented and colored as I conceive it to have 
 been in the days of its pristine magnificence." — Part i. 
 sec. i. p. 155. 
 
 Of the Colossal Bulls, fifteen feet in height, which adorned 
 the Propylaea of this edifice, he says, " There is a massive- 
 ness in the muscular development, and a rugged solidity 
 about the joints, which give to these animals a character of 
 gigantic force unmatched, so far as I knov/, in auimal sculp- 
 ture, but analogous to what the Greeks attained in their 
 representation of Hercules." — Part i. sec. i. p. 109. Of 
 Persian architecture, as compared with Grecian, he says, 
 
64 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 were distinguished by moral sensibility. "They hold 
 it," says Herodotus, " unlawful to talk of anything it is 
 unlawful to do.^ Lying, they think, is most disgraceful ; 
 and, next to this, to be in debt. This, for several 
 reasons, but especially because they think that one who 
 is in debt, must of necessity tell lies."^ One of their 
 names for God was, "The Father of Truth." 
 
 The Persian now is speculative and fond of the mys- 
 terious, but not fanatical. The Persian of old was 
 imaginative, earnestly inquisitive, generously apprecia- 
 tive. He easily adopted foreign customs; — "no na- 
 tion," says Herodotus, " more readily ; " ^ — yet he was 
 tenacious of his own ideas. The law of the Medes and 
 Persians altered not. Their ancient religion sometimes 
 attracted and allied thoughts and usages of other na- 
 tions, yet ever kept its own.* 
 
 ^' The comparison is more favorable to Persia than one 
 might at first be led to expect ; and her Art, when we accus- 
 tom ourselves to its imfamiHar forms, has an elegance and 
 grace, as well as an appropriateness, that renders it well 
 worthy of study and attention." — Part i. sec. i. p. 87, 88, 89. 
 
 ^ Herodotus, book i. sec. 138. 
 
 ^ Book i. sec. 138. They teach their sons three things ; 
 to ride, to use the bow, and to speak the truth. — Book i. 
 sec. 136. In Persia, Malcolm says, '^ nobody walks." In the 
 sadddle the Persians handle the matchlock as adroitly as of 
 old the bow. But all travellers report that, as to truthful- 
 ness, they have degenerated. 
 
 ^ Herodotus, book i. sec. 135. 
 
 * Of the Parsees, as the small remnant of believers in 
 the old Persian religion in Persia and India are called, con- 
 verts to Christianity there are few or none. 
 
OF THE PEUSIANS. 65 
 
 In energy, the Persians, of all Asiatics, are most like 
 Europeans. This energy is due in part to the bounds 
 appointed them. A country central in Asia ; low, 
 sandy, hot coasts along the gulf; elsewhere, an upland 
 of cool and bracing]: air ; mountain ridofes in all direc- 
 tions ; vales and plains of verdure ; vast salt deserts — 
 on the whole a poor country,^ uninviting to strangers,^ 
 yet loved with passion by the Persians, whose thousand 
 poets, ^ in strains awaking the envy of other countries, 
 sino^ the land of the rose and the nis^htino^ale. 
 
 ^ Yet the Persians may well boast of their fruits. In the 
 hot, sandy tract, the date, the fig, the pomegranate, the 
 lemon, the orange, come to perfectioa ; and the grapes of 
 Shiraz are good as its wine. The peach tree is said to be 
 a native of Persia, and there grow all the fruits of the 
 temperate zone. 
 
 ^ Yet a most interesting country, as presenting divers 
 forms of life, that for European races live only in history 
 and romance. The Persians, iisteuicg to bards reciting from 
 the Shahnameh, recall the Greeks, who, in like manner 
 and with like emotion, knew the songs of Homer. The 
 wild clans of the mountains, with their fealty to their chiefs, 
 their fastnesses among the hills, their raids on the flocks and 
 herds of the lowlands, are the Highlanders in the novels of 
 Scott. The lords of Persia in their strongholds, with armed 
 retainers around, are the great nobles of the Feudal age in 
 Europe ; their power, their state, their high heroic qualities 
 the same ; their passions, too, the same ; the same their 
 lawlessness, their craft, their cruelty. 
 
 ^ Literally so, if we count in the number the bards, who, 
 in every village, and to the tribes of the mountains at night- 
 fall, to impassioned listeners crowding round, recite heroic 
 stanzas from the Shahnameh, or sing the odes of Hafiz, or 
 5 
 
6Q CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 The historic period of Persia began in the seventh 
 century before Christ (B. C. 65S), when Achjenienes — 
 a leader whose name the Persian monarchs loved to re- 
 call — led an emigration into a narrow territory, along 
 the northern shore of the Persian Gulf. There he founded 
 a kingdom ; and there were the ancient Persian capitals, 
 Pasargadse and Persepolis. When the Persians thus 
 came into Persia Proper, their kinsmen, the Medes, 
 who appear earlier in history, dwelt in the region ad- 
 joining it on the north. A century later, these kin- 
 dred tribes, coming under one government, ruled from 
 the hio^hlands east of the Tif^ris to the hio^hlands west 
 of the Indus, and from the Caspian Sea and the River 
 Oxus to the Persian Gulf. The Persian Empire, thus 
 founded in the sixth century before Christ (B. C. 558) 
 by Cyrus the Great, besides Persia or Iran, embraced, 
 at one time or another, Assyria, Syria, Asia Minor, 
 islands of the ^gean, Egypt, parts of Arabia, of 
 Scythia, and of India. In the fourth century before 
 Christ (B. C. 331) Persia was conquered by the 
 Greeks. In the third century before Christ the Par- 
 thians — a tribe that had been subject to the Persians 
 - — rose up against the successors of Alexander, and at 
 length founded the Parthian Empire. In the third 
 century after Christ (A. D. 226) the Persians re- 
 established their own kingdom. In the seventh century 
 (A. D. 651) the Arabs converted the Persians to Mo- 
 hammedanism, by the sword. The cruelty of their 
 
 of Saadi. Persia is just at that stage of culture wlieu poetry 
 is the passion of all classes. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 67 
 
 conquest, while it explains their success, shows the 
 Persians tenacious of their relio^ion. Its success is also 
 explained by the fact, that the religion of the Persians 
 and of Mohammed had points of contact in the idea of 
 one God, in detestation of idols, and in some common 
 traditions. In some Moslem sects in Persia, and in 
 Persian poetry, an influence from the old religion may 
 be discerned ; but so thorough was the conquest, that 
 only a few who clung to the old religion remained in 
 Persia ; only a few escaped into India. In Persia this 
 remnant are called Guebres — Fire Worshippers. In 
 India they are called Parsees — that is, Persians. Most 
 of their merchants live in the city of Bombay. For 
 their numbers, the Parsees are the wealthiest race under 
 British dominion in India, and the most intelligent and 
 charitable. Throughout the commercial world their 
 merchants have a high character for energy and honor. 
 In the seventh century before Christ the historic 
 period of Persia began ; but some of the monuments 
 of its religion are of much older date. They are as old 
 as any of the monuments of the religion of India, if 
 they do not, in fact, transcend them all in antiquity, and 
 reach near to the age of the primeval kingdoms of 
 Egypt and Babylon. The Zend, the sacred language 
 of Persia, and the most ancient dialect of the Sanscrit, 
 the sacred language of India, are the same language.^ 
 
 ^ Of Zend, Dr. Haug states, '' Its relation to the most 
 ancient Sanscrit, the so-called Vedic dialect, is as close as 
 that of the different dialects of the Grecian language, 
 ^olic, Ionic, Doric, and Attic, to each other." — Essays on 
 
68 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 The language and traditions of these two countries 
 prove, that at some very remote epoch there was, in 
 a people of the same language, a division, caused in a 
 measure by a divergence in religion,^ and resulting in 
 the formation of two peoples. One part of this 
 ancient community kept more pure the truth revealed to 
 
 the Sacred Language, Writings, and Religion of the Par- 
 sees, by Martin Haug, Dr. Phil., late of the Universities of 
 Tubingen, Gottingen, and Bonn ; Superintendent of San- 
 scrit Studies, and Professor of Sanscrit in the Poona College, 
 Bombay. 1862, part ii. p. 117. Dr. Haug states that the 
 Brahmins, -who are perfectly acquainted with the classi- 
 cal Sanscrit, as he calls it, are unable to explain the more 
 ancient parts of the Vedas ; and that " there is no doubt 
 the classical Sanscrit was formed long after the separation of 
 the Iranians from the Hindus." — Part ii, pp. 117, 118. The 
 Zend, he calls "the elder sister of the Sanscrit." — Part i. 
 p. 17. Hard wick calls it " second, if not the eldest of the 
 sister tongwes which form the Indo-European family." He 
 says. Purely philological reasons leave no doubt of the " pro- 
 tracted intercourse of Persians and Hindus, who clung to- 
 gether as a great community ages after the migrations of the 
 Celt, the Teuton, and the Sclave across the bounds of East- 
 ern Europe." — Christ and other Masters, by Charles Hard- 
 wick, Cambridge, England, 1862. Part iv. chap. iii. p. 147. 
 ^ The evidence of this Is in facts, of which the following 
 are specimens : " In all the Vedas, and in Brahminic litera- 
 ture, Deva Is the name of the gods who are objects of 
 worship to this day. In the Zendavesta, from its earliest to its 
 latest parts, and even in modern Persian literature, deva — 
 modern Persian . div — is the general name of an evil spirit or 
 devil." — Dr. Haug, part iv. p. 225. In the Vedas, Indra is 
 the highest of the gods, and a benevolent deity ; with the 
 Persians he is degraded in rank, and malevolent In character. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 69 
 
 the fathers of mankind, the other corrupted it into a 
 pantheistic nature-worship. The line of this division 
 was the River Indus, and the Persians and the Hindoos 
 its monuments. 
 
 This division was the final breaking up of that pri- 
 maeval family or tribe in Asia, from out of which, 
 before this, had been the migrations of those, who, 
 within the bounds of Europe, were to become the 
 Greeks, the Romans, the Celts, the Teutons, and the 
 Sclaves ; in a word, the nations of Europe, in their 
 long succession and varied development — migrations 
 not within any historic period, but attested to have been 
 out of the bosom of the same family by resemblances 
 in their languages, through which the languages of 
 Persia, of India, and of Europe have been classed 
 together as one grand division of human speech, and 
 called the Indo-Germanic, or Indo-European, or Aryan, 
 or Japhetan languages — names, each of which strives 
 to grasp and express the unity and diversity of this 
 wonderful phenomenon ; as in like manner, and with 
 like cause, the languages of the Arabs, the Syrians, 
 the Phoenicians, and the Hebrews are called Shemitic 
 lano;uao^es. 
 
 In a time, then, far beyond the reach of the usual 
 appliances of human history, in a region somewhere in 
 the heart of Asia, there appears the early vision of a 
 family from which go forth, towards the east, the lords 
 of India, and towards the west, the successive races 
 that peopled Europe, and are now spreading over the 
 Americas, and the expectant islands of the deep. I 
 
70 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 know of no such far-reaching prospect in human his- 
 tory, of no higher summit of mortal vision, from which 
 to survey the procession of the nations, the on windings 
 of the oceanic stream of life. This affiliation of nations, 
 so far severed in space and time, so different in their 
 tongues to the common ear, and so distinct in their 
 histories, this affiliation that connects them into one 
 division of the human race and disconnects them from 
 the others, is a grand fact, that kindles the soul to 
 thought. What was the religion of this family, before 
 it broke up, to find such different destinies? What was 
 its religion far away back in that early day, when the 
 fathers of these unborn nations spoke one language? 
 There is something in all the mythologies of this great 
 family of the human race, suggesting that its religion, 
 then, was the worship of God. Over all its idolatry 
 broods the dim presence of some One higher and soli- 
 tary Power ; and to the ages gone, as to a fount of 
 wiser inspiration, all these varied nations have looked 
 back with dim, regretful memories. As their tradi- 
 tions are traced farther backwards, they more and more 
 approximate towards the primeval facts recorded in the 
 annals of our ancient and holy religion, and ever more 
 and more appear the tokens of some early relation of 
 the one only living and true God. Many and varied 
 are the lines of evidence that point to this conclusion ; 
 but I find the decisive proof of the fact in the ancient 
 reHgious monuments of the Persians, as connected with 
 that struggle against idolatry which resulted in their 
 existence as a people. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 71 
 
 Zendavesta ^ is the name given to what remains of the 
 relisfious records of the ancient Medes and Persians. 
 It consists of a few hymns and prayers, and of one 
 only of twenty-one books that contained their religious 
 and scientific ideas. The Zendavesta, though but a 
 fragment of an extensive literature, contains those parts 
 of it most important for understanding the rise, genius, 
 and history of the Persian religion. A few of its 
 hymns and prayers are written in a dialect much older 
 than the rest of it, and such changes appear in its lan- 
 guage, and so many centuries were required for the 
 formation of the literature to which it belonged, that 
 the most ancient of its hymns were probably written at 
 a time not much later than that of Moses. Some of the 
 oldest of these hymns were composed by Zoroaster, 
 and their age determines the period in which he lived. 
 
 This sage, whom Iran revered as her prophet, in the 
 Zendavesta is styled Zarathrustra, — a word changed 
 by the Romans into Zoroaster.^ The Greeks and 
 Romans took this for a proper name. It was the title of 
 the Hiirh Priest of Iran. The Zoroaster of world-wide 
 fame is distinguished in the Zendavesta by his family 
 name, Spitama. His successors in office were thought 
 to commune with God, as the Persians believed Zoro- 
 aster did ; their sayings and doings were confounded by 
 foreigners with his ; and hence the uncertainty as to the 
 
 ^ This name indicates that the Book consists of a Text 
 (Avesta), and a comment upon it (Zend). 
 
 ^ By the Greeks into Zarastrades aad Zoroastres ; bj the 
 Parsees into Zcrdosht. 
 
72 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 age in which he lived, and whether there were one, two, 
 three, or more of the same name — questions long dis- 
 cussed among the learned.^ 
 
 In forming a conception of any old religion, we al- 
 most, of necessity, conceive of it as it may have been at 
 some one period, and so include in our conception of it 
 features it may have had earlier or later. All the re- 
 lictions of old had chano^es from without and from within ; 
 but there were peculiar and great features of the Persian 
 religion that were always the same. The Persians of 
 old were not idolaters. They believed in a self-existent 
 Creator of all good. His name was Ahura-Mazda, 
 thouo^ht to mean the Livin<? Creator of all — a name, in 
 later Persian, contracted into Ormazd. The Persians 
 conceived of another being, also self-existent, who was 
 the creator of evil. His name was Angromainyus , 
 in later Persian, Ahriman, Such a creed, strictly con- 
 strued, held to two eternal powers ; but, happily, it 
 was inconsistent with its first principles. The good 
 being was mightier than the evil being, and, in the end, 
 was to destroy him. 
 
 Having a revelation of the spirituality of God, the 
 Persian reared to him no temple, fashioned of him no 
 image. He worshipped him before a flame of fire. 
 Herodotus says, " the Persians held Fire to be a god ; " '^ 
 but this was not the belief of Iran. These words are 
 from the oldest recorded utterance of her ancient fiiith, 
 
 ^ Haug, part iii. sec. 27, p. 232 ; comp. 134. 
 ^ Herodotus, book iii. sec. 16, 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 73 
 
 from a creed, or prayer, or hymn — it is all three in 
 one — of Zoroaster himself: "Blessed is he, blessed are 
 all men, to whom the living, wise God, of his own 
 command, should grant those two everlasting powers, 
 — health of the soul, and immortality. For this very 
 good, I beseech Thee, Ahura-Mazda, mayest thou, 
 through thy angel of piety, give me happiness, the true 
 good things, and the possession of the good mind. I 
 believe Thee to be the best being of all ; the source of 
 Light for the world. Everybody shall choose Thee as the 
 source of Light ; Thee, holiest spirit. Thou createst all 
 good things. ... I will believe Thee to be powerful, 
 holy. For thou givest, with thy hand filled with helps, 
 good to the pious man, as well as to the impious, by 
 means of the warmth of the fire streno^thenins: the srood 
 things."^ 
 
 The Median usage of worshipping before a flame of 
 fire may have, in part, originated in, and certainly in 
 part is to be explained by, the Oriental, ancient idea of 
 the element, Light. Of this essence, that which we 
 call Light, was to the Persian but one of the various 
 manifestations ; Heat was another ; and both were com- 
 bined in the blaze of the fire. The invisible, universal, 
 manifold element itself, he thought, in some way, per- 
 tained to God. Among the sayings ascribed by the 
 Greeks to the Persians, it was said of God, "his body 
 resembles Light, as his spirit resembles Truth." This 
 reminds of what is written in the Divine Oracles : 
 
 ^ Gatha Ustavaiti, i. 1,2, 4. Haug, p. 147. 
 
7'J: CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 God "covereth himself with light, as with a garment ; " * 
 " He dwelleth in light, which no man can approach unto."^ 
 The Persian thought this divine element was the media ^ 
 of creative energy. Ahura-Mcizda created, " through 
 his inborn lustre, the multitude of the celestial lumi- 
 naries."* It was the media of his omnipresent agency, 
 — " by the warmth of the fire strengthening the good 
 things " he had created. 
 
 Of this divine element, the gross, material fire on the 
 Median altars was a symbol. To form this altar-fire,' 
 fires from sixteen places were brought together in one ; 
 fire generated by the rubbing together of two sticks of 
 wood, fire from the kitchen, fire from steel-workers, 
 glass-makers, potters, dyers, all the mechanics, and fire 
 from a funeral pile. The corpse was pollution to a 
 Mede or a Persian ;^ yet the fire, in which a dead body 
 had been burned, was the most indispensable of all to 
 the symbolical flame on the altar, for it was thought to 
 have absorbed the fire in the human frame. Four was 
 a perfect number, and the square of four filled out to 
 perfection the fulness of the representative idea in the 
 fire gathered from sixteen fires.^ This collective fire 
 
 1 Psalms civ. 2. 2 j xim. vi. 16. 
 
 ^ Gatha Ustavaiti, i. 1, 2, 4. Haug, p. 147. 
 
 * I use the plural iuteutionally, in view of the manifold- 
 ness of the element, — Light. Mark the expression, " Father 
 of Lights." — James i. 17. 
 
 ^ The Vendidad, Fargard, v.-viii., contains minute direc- 
 tions for the treatment of a dead body. Running through 
 these all is the idea of its utter impurity. 
 
 ^ The Vendidad, Fargard, viii. 73-96, contains directions 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 75 
 
 represented that element which is the unseen cause of all 
 seeing, and of the heat, through which is the growth 
 of the vegetable and animal worlds. The visible fire 
 on the altar was a symbol of the invisible fire that per- 
 vaded and vivified all things, and was the life in nature. 
 It represented a great and universal mystery, behind 
 which was the mystery of mysteries ; for that invisible 
 fire was the Shelcinah itself. Hence, the collective, 
 mystic flame, purified by prayers said over it to God, 
 was so sacred that it became impure if the direct rays, 
 even of the sun, fell upon it.^ 
 
 The Mede and the Persian thouMit that, throuo^h this 
 
 for the preparation of the sacred Fire. The Parsees observe 
 them at this day. The reason for the number is a conjec- 
 ture of mine. Traces of a lost science or art of numbers, 
 seem to run through Oriental, ancient thinking. Some of 
 these appear in Holy Writ, alike in the books of Moses, 
 learned in the wisdom of Egypt, and of Daniel, learned in 
 the wisdom of Chaldea. Some of the thought of this lost 
 art may be gathered here and there. Philo Judaeus preserves 
 something of this, as to the first seven numbers. Four, he 
 says, is " a perfect number," and " preeminent in nature." 
 He proposed to show its mystic powers, in full, in a 
 special treatise. — On the World, sees. xiv. xv. xvi. xvii. 
 Seneca tells how certain of the Magi, who chanced to be at 
 Athens, where Plato died on his eighty-first birthday, were 
 so struck with his perfect time-cycle, nine, the most perfect 
 of numbers, multiplied into itself, or the square of nine, that 
 they paid honors to him, as to one more than a mortal. — 
 Ep. 58. 
 
 ^ Their Atish-khudars, houses for the sacred fire, are so 
 constructed now by the Parsees, that the sun-rays cannot 
 fall on the sacred fire. 
 
76 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 sacred flame, God might reveal his truth to his true 
 worshippers. Zoroaster said, "Standing at thy fire, 
 among thy worsliippers who pray to thee, I will be 
 mindful of the truth ; " ^ and he exhorted his disciples 
 " to contemplate the beams of the fire with a most pious 
 mind."^ Standing thus himself, musing, praying, wor- 
 shipping, his burning thoughts seemed to him kindled 
 from the altar-blaze. "I will now tell you," he says, 
 "you, who are assembled here, the wise sayings of the 
 Most Wise, the praises of the Living God, and the 
 songs of the good Spirit, the sublime truth which I see 
 arising out of these sacred flames."^ This custom of 
 worshipping before a flame was older than the time of 
 Zoroaster. I think it may have originated in some old 
 tradition of a revelation of God through a flame of fire, 
 like to that Moses beheld in Midian.^ 
 
 Ormazd said, " My light is concealed under all that 
 shines;"^ and hence the Persian, as he revered the 
 sacred fire, revered also the sun, the moon, and every 
 shining thing. This reverence, easily mistaken for 
 idolatry, no doubt often became idolatrous. No doubt 
 the Persians often confounded the media of the power 
 of the omnipresent God — his symbols — with God 
 himself. 
 
 It being a dogma of the Persian religion, that all the 
 
 ^ Gatha Ustavaiti, i. 9. Haug, p. 148. 
 ^ Gatha Ahunavaiti, iii. 2. Haug, p. 151. 
 ^ The same, sec. i. * Exodus iii. 1-6. 
 
 •^ Cited by Malcolm, as from the Zendavesta. Hist, of 
 Persia, vol. i. ch. vii. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 77 
 
 evil in the world was created by an evil being, all that 
 was good was representative of the power and the glory 
 of the good Being; and, through such things, the 
 Creator might be worshipped. 
 
 The idea of the representative glory of God shining 
 through what he had made, comes out in the Persian 
 idea of a king. "I am," says Jamschid, in the Shah- 
 7iameh, " by the divine favor, both sovereign and 
 priest." The Persian monarch was pontiff, as well as 
 king. His palace was, in some sort, a temple ; his 
 court, a copy of that of Ormazd. In number, the great 
 officers around his throne corresponded to the archan- 
 gels in the courts on high. The King, exalted by the 
 divine will to the dazzling preeminence of temporal 
 and spiritual lord of the Persians, was to them an image 
 of the power and glory of God. Something of this idea 
 may be seen in the decree of Darius, that, for thirty 
 days, no one should offer any petition to God or man, 
 save to himself;^ in the rule that no one, not even the 
 Queen, might come before the King, in his palace, un- 
 bidden, and live, unless he held out the golden sceptre ; ^ 
 and, in this, that the laws of the King, like the laws of 
 God, altered not. In the Persian sense of the word, 
 the King was worshipped. Plutarch, in his life of The- 
 mistocles, says, "None durst appear before the King, 
 without prostrating themselves on the ground." Nor did 
 they exact this only from their own vassals, but also 
 from foreign ministers and ambassadors ; the captain of 
 
 ^ Daniel vi. 4-9. ^ Esther iv. 10, 11. 
 
78 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 the guard being charged to inquire of those who asked 
 admittance to the king, whether they were ready to 
 adore him. This is exphiiiied by what Artabanus said 
 to Themistocles : " Among the many excellent laws of 
 ours, the most excellent is this, that the king is to be 
 honored and worshipped religiously, as the image of 
 that God which conserveth all things." 
 
 According to the Persian creed, Ormazd was the 
 creator of light, Ahriman of darkness ; and the never- 
 ceasinor war of li^^ht and darkness, the true imas^eof the 
 conflict betw^een them. To take part in this conflict, 
 Ormazd created six archangels, Ahriman, six demons ; 
 the one, legions of messengers of light, the other, of 
 emissaries of darkness. 
 
 The Persian religion discerned the superhuman origin 
 of the evil there is in the world ; and that God wages 
 against it real, unceasing, and at last, victorious war. 
 It predicted that in the end a Kedeemer would come 
 to do away with death, and to raise the dead. It 
 taught the Persian, that if he approved himself on the 
 side of the Good Being, by good thoughts, good words, 
 and good deeds, he himself, both body and soul, should 
 share in his triumphs. 
 
 In proof of some of these statements as to the re- 
 ligion of the Persians, I cite Scripture, whose date is 
 prior to the birth of the founder of the Persian empire. 
 " I am God, and there is none else ; I am God, and 
 there is none like me ; declaring the end from the be- 
 ginning, and from ancient times the things that are not 
 yet done, saying. My counsel shall stand, and I will do 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 79 
 
 all My pleasure : calling a ravenous bird ^ from the 
 East, the man ^ that executeth my counsel from a far 
 country : yea, I have spoken it, I will also bring it to 
 pass ; I have purposed it, I will also do it." ^ 
 
 " I am the Lord that maketh all things ; that stretch- 
 eth forth the heavens alone ; that spreadeth abroad the 
 earth by myself; . . . that saith of Cyrus, He is my 
 shepherd, and shall perform all my pleasure : even say- 
 ing to Jerusalem, Thou shalt be built ; and to the tem- 
 ple. Thy foundation shall be laid."^ 
 
 " Thus saith the Lord to his anointed, to Cyrus, whose 
 right han-d I have holden, to subdue nations before 
 him ; and I will loose the loins of kings, to open be- 
 fore him the two-leaved gates, and the gates shall not 
 be shut ; I will go before thee, and make the crooked 
 places straight ; I will break in pieces the gates of 
 brass, and cut in sunder the bars of iron ; and I will 
 give thee the treasures of darkness, and hidden riches 
 of secret places, that thou mayest know that I, the 
 Lord, which call thee by thy name, am the God of 
 Israel. For Jacob my servant's sake, and Israel mine 
 elect, I have even called thee by thy name : I have 
 surnamed thee, though thou hast not known me. I am 
 the Lord, and there is none else, there is no God beside 
 me : I ^ii'ded thee, thouoh thou hast not known me : 
 that they may know from the rising of the sun, and from 
 the west, that there is none beside me. I am the Lord, 
 and there is none else. I form the light, and create 
 
 ^ The Persian eagle. See note on p. 57. 
 
 2 Cyrus. 2 Isa. xlvi. 9, 10, 11. ''Isa. xliv. 24, 28. 
 
80 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 darkness; I make peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, 
 do all these things." ^ 
 
 These words prove Schlegel's assertion, that in the 
 Bible the Persians are not classed with heathen na- 
 tions. For Cyrus is called the Lord's " shepherd " and 
 the Lord's " anointed," which is evidence that he was a 
 worshipper of God ; and this is certain, when it is said 
 the Lord will strengthen the right hand of his anointed 
 to subdue the " nations ; " for the term rendered " na- 
 tions " means the heathen, or worshippers of idols, in 
 strict opposition to the Israelites. 
 
 Yet the Lord said to Cyrus, " Thou hast not known 
 me ; " from which it is to be inferred, that although 
 Cyrus was no idol-worshipper, his idea of God was im- 
 perfect, erroneous, or contradictory ; and as the words 
 following — "I am the Lord, and there is none else; 
 there is no God beside me," — are naturally taken as 
 referring to those that precede, there is in them evidence 
 of the divinity of Ahriman in the Persian creed. When 
 this is said again, it is followed by words manifestly 
 pointed against this doctrine of the Persian religion : 
 "I form the light, and create the darkness. I make 
 peace, and create evil. I, the Lord, do all these 
 thinsrs." 
 
 o 
 
 The fact so strongly inferred from Scripture, that the 
 Persian religion held to two Creators, is clearly proved 
 by the first two of the five small collections of hymns 
 in the Zendavesta, called Gathas. These were written 
 
 1 Isa. xlv. 1-7. 
 
or THE PERSIANS. 81 
 
 by Zoroaster. He says, "In the beginning, there 
 were a pair of twins ; two spirits, each with a peculiar 
 activity : these are the good and the base, in thought, 
 word, and deed. And these two spirits created mate- 
 rial things; the one the reality, the other the non- 
 reality. Of these two spirits, you must choose the 
 one, either the evil, the originator of the worst actions, 
 or the true, holy spirit."^ Here, the idea of two Crea- 
 tors, each the antithesis of the other, is expressed 
 with a clearness beyond contradiction. In the last 
 three Gathas the idea is different. This inquiry is 
 addressed to God: "Art Thou not He in whom is 
 hidden the last cause of both intellects, good and base? " 
 
 and the Creator of good and evil is said to be one 
 
 and the same. 
 
 These words may have come from Zoroaster's dis- 
 ciples ; their first, but not their last, attempt to reduce 
 his system to pure Monotheism. If from the sage him- 
 self, they prove that his thoughts were inconsistent; 
 that in vain attempts to change faith into philosophy, 
 to solve the problem of evil, whose solution is beyond 
 the powers of man, and which God hath not revealed, 
 he became bewildered, and contradicted himself. Or, it 
 may be these darkened utterances repeat but what he had 
 heard.. It may be he did not originate that Dualism, 
 which was the greatest error in the creed of Iran, but he 
 did sanction it ; and his creed, if judged only by this 
 doo-ma, must be condemned as worse than that of the 
 
 1 Gatha Ahunavait, iii. 3, 4. Haug, p. 142. 
 6 
 
82 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 heathen. But the religion of the intellect and of the 
 heart are not just the same. The heart of Zoroaster 
 forbade him to follow out his creed to its consequences ; 
 and he seemed to have given to the spirit, from whom 
 he believed that evil originated, divine attributes, with- 
 out clearly seeing they were such. For, in his say- 
 ings, — and so, too, in the Zoroastrian religion, — Ahri- 
 man is really an inferior power. He says, " Wisdom is 
 the shelter from lies, the annihilation of the destroyer," 
 — that is, of the evil spirit.^ His allusions to Ahriman 
 are chiefly in exhortations to withstand his assaults : 
 " Those who are opposed in their thoughts, words, and 
 actions to the wicked, and think only of the welfare of 
 creation, their efforts will be crowned with success 
 through the mercy of Ahura-Mazda.'"'^ 
 
 It would seem that the fearful dogma of an evil 
 being, ever creating evil, would have made the religion 
 of the Persians gloomy and despairing. It might have 
 been so in the forests of Scandinavia, but it was not 
 beneath the brilliant sky of Iran. It might have been 
 so among some races, but by nature " the Persians are 
 the most cheerful people in the world." 
 
 Something of this must be ascribed to the piety of 
 Zoroaster. The dogma of an evil creator was so dis- 
 armed of its overshadowing terror by his trust in God, 
 that although it ever remained an article in the creed 
 of the religion which revered him as its prophet, that 
 religion was of good cheer, and alone, of the religions 
 
 ^ Gatha Ahuaavaiti, iii. 10. Hang, p. 143. 
 ^ Gatha Ahunavaiti, iv. 322. Hang, p. 145. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 83 
 
 of the world, looked forward with hope. Zoroaster's 
 words are the accents of a soul inquiring after God, 
 elevated, strengthened, purified by contemplation of 
 Him, and by the assurance of immortal righteousness. 
 They show him to have been a child-like lover of God, 
 whom he calls " the living, the faithful, the generous, 
 the holy." 
 
 "That will I ask of Thee, tell it me right, Thou 
 living God ! who was, in the beginning, the Father and 
 Creator of truth. Who made of the sun and stars the 
 way? Who causes the moon to increase and wane if 
 not Thou ? This I wish to know, except what I already 
 know. 
 
 "That will I ask of Thee, tell it me right. Thou 
 living God ! who is holding the earth and the skies 
 above it? Who made the waters, and the trees of the 
 field? Who is in the wind and storms that they so 
 quickly run ? Who is the creator of the good-minded 
 beings. Thou Wise? 
 
 " That will I ask Thee, tell it me right. Thou Living 
 God. Who made the lights of good effect, and the 
 darkness ? Who made the sleep of good effect, and the 
 activity? Who made morning, noon, and night, re- 
 minding always the priest of his duties? 
 
 " When my eyes beheld Thee, the Essence of Truth, 
 the Creator of Life, who manifests his life in his works, 
 then I knew Thee to be the primeval spirit — Thou 
 Wise, so high in mind as to create the world, and the 
 father of the good mind. 
 
 ''I believe in Thee as ^he Holy God, Thou living 
 
84 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 Wise ! because I beheld Thee to be the primeval cause 
 of life in the creation. For Thou hast made holy 
 customs and words. Thou hast given emptiness to the 
 base, and good to the good man. I will believe in 
 Thee, Thou glorious God I in the last period of crea- 
 tion." ^ 
 
 He met in this world the treatment given to all of 
 whom the world is not worthy : " To what country shall 
 I go ? Where shall I take my refuge ? What country 
 is sheltering the master and his companion ? None of 
 the servants pay reverence to me, nor the wicked rulers 
 of the country. How shall I worship Thee further, 
 Living Wise? 
 
 "I know that I am helpless. Look at me being 
 amongst few men, for I have but few men, I implore 
 Thee, weeping, Thou Living God, who grantest happi- 
 ness as a friend gives a present to a friend. The good 
 of the good mind is in Thy own possession. Thou 
 True."^ 
 
 These few broken words shadow forth much of the 
 unknown of his history. These reveal the hope that 
 cheered him. "Let us be such as help the life of the 
 future. . . . The prudent man icishes only to he there, 
 tchere wisdom is at home. . . All perfect things are 
 garnered up in the splendid residence of the Angel of 
 
 ^ These are sentences from the first two Gathas — choice 
 sentences, that give much too high an idea of the general 
 character of the Zendavesta. 
 
 ^ Gatha Ustavaiti, iv. 1, 2. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 85 
 
 Righteousness, the Angel of Wisdom, the Angel of 
 Truth." 1 
 
 In the fragments of the sayings of Zoroaster there is 
 no clear trace of the doctrine of the resurrection of the 
 dead ; yet the Persians seem to have found there its 
 germ, at least ; for they gave, as a name to the renova- 
 tion of all things, in which they believed the dead would 
 arise, a phrase of Zoroaster's — " the perpetuation of life." 
 
 In the Zendavesta it is foretold that Sosiosh, a great 
 prophet, commissioned by Ahura-Mazda to restore and 
 make all things new, "shall slay death," ^ and that "in 
 his time the dead will rise."^ 
 
 The angels of Zoroaster are personifications of the 
 divine attributes rather than real beings, with the ex- 
 ception of Serosh, the angel of the religion of Iran. In 
 after times, each abstraction of the mind, each faculty 
 of the soul, each animate and inanimate thing, was 
 thought to have its spirit or genius, and each human 
 being his angel. The old Persian walked, attended by 
 a multitude of spirits of light or of spirits of darkness. 
 To good spirits, veneration was given ; many of them 
 were invoked with prayer ; and some angels of high 
 rank were so invested with titles and honors of gods of 
 other nations, as to give rise to the assertion, that the 
 Persians had adopted them. 
 
 As the mysterious element. Light, pervaded every- 
 thing in the good creation, every such thing might be 
 
 Gatha Ahunavaiti, iii. 9, 10. 
 
 Vendidad. Fargard, xix. ^ Zemyad yasht. 
 
86 CHAKACTEPw AND RELIGION 
 
 f 
 
 an object of reverence, and reverence was edpecially 
 given to the four elements, to the sun, to the moon, and 
 every shining thing. This recondite idea, together with 
 the belief that everything in the good creation had its 
 genius or angel, which might be invoked with prayer, 
 often made their relis^ion uuintellimble to the heathen of 
 old, who interpreted its creed by their own. 
 
 Gibbon says, "The theology of Zoroaster was dark- 
 ly comprehended by foreigners ; . . . but the most care- 
 less observers were struck with the philosophic simplici- 
 ty of the Persian worship. ' That people,' says Herodo- 
 tus, ' rejects the use of temples, of altars, and of statues, 
 and smiles at the folly of those nations who imagine that 
 the gods are sprung. from, or bear any affinity with, tlie 
 human nature. The tops of the highest mountains are 
 the places chosen for sacrifices. Hymns and prayers 
 are the principal worship ; the Supreme God, who fills 
 the wide circle of heaven, is the object to whom they are 
 addressed.' Yet, at the same time, in the true spirit 
 of a Polytheist, he accuses them of adoring earth, water, 
 fire, the winds, and the sun and moon. But Persians 
 of every age have denied the charge, and explained the 
 equivocal conduct which might appear to give a color 
 to it. The elements, and more particularly the sun, 
 whom they called Mithra, were the objects of their re- 
 ligious reverence, because they considered them as the 
 purest symbols, the noblest productions, and the most 
 powerful agents of the Divine Power and nature."^ 
 
 ^ Gibbou's History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman 
 Ennpire, ch. viii. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 87 
 
 Missionaries brino^ the same charoe aofainst the Par- 
 sees now ; and it is answered by them in the same way. 
 The Parsees revere Zoroaster as their prophet ; they 
 receive the Zenda vesta as their sacred book ; their rites 
 are those of their ancestors ; their creed expresses the 
 Persian religion of old, in its purest form ; therefore 
 I cite part of a Catechism appended to the Book of 
 Prayer, now used by the Parsees in India. 
 
 " We believe in only one God ; and do not believe in 
 any beside him. Question. Who is that one God? 
 Answer, The God who created the heavens and the 
 earth, the angels, the stars, the sun, the moon, the fire, 
 the water, or all the four elements, and all things in the 
 two worlds : that God we believe in ;. Him we invoke, 
 and Him we adore. Ques. What is the form of our 
 God ? A.ns. Our God has neither face, nor form, color, 
 nor shape, nor fixed place. There is no other like Him. 
 He is himself singly, such a glory that we cannot de- 
 scribe Him, nor our mind comprehend Him. Ques. 
 What is our religion ? Ans. Our religion is the wor- 
 ship of God. Ques. Whence did we receive our 
 religion? Ans. From God's true prophet, the true 
 Zoroaster. He broug^ht our religion for us from God. 
 Ques. Where should I turn my face when worshipping 
 the holy Ormazd. Ajis. We should worship the holy, 
 just Ormazd, with our face toward some of his creations 
 of light, glory, and brightness. Ques. What are those 
 things? Ans. Such as the sun, the moon, the stars, 
 the fire, water, and such things of glory. To such 
 thino^s we should turn our f\ice, because God has be- 
 
88 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 stowed upon them a small spark of His true glory ; and 
 they are, therefore, more exalted in the creation, and 
 fit to represent to us this power and glory. Ques. 
 Among the creation of Ormazd, which is the most 
 exalted ? A71S. The great prophet is the most exalted ; 
 and that prophet is the excellent Zoroaster; none is 
 higher than he ; the height of dignity culminates in him, 
 because he is the most honored and beloved of God. 
 Ques, If we commit any sin, will our prophet save us? 
 A.ns. Never commit any sin under that faith ; because 
 our prophet, our guide, has distinctly commanded you 
 shall receive according to what you do. If you do vir- 
 tuous and pious actions, your reward shall be heaven. 
 If you sin, and do wicked things, your reward shall be 
 hell. There is none save God, that can save you from 
 the consequences of your sins. If you repent of your 
 sins and reform, and the Great Judge consider you 
 worthy of pardon, or would be merciful to you. He 
 alone can and will save you. Ques. What are those 
 things by which man is blessed and benefited. A.}is. 
 To do virtuous deeds, to give in charity, to be kind, to 
 be humble, to speak the truth, to suppress anger, to be 
 patient and contented, to be friendly, to feel shame, to 
 pay due respect to the old and young, to be pious, to 
 respect our parents and teachers. Ques. What are 
 those things by which man is lost or degraded? A7is. 
 To tell untruths, to steal, to gamble, to commit treachery, 
 to abuse, to be angry, to wish ill to another, to be proud, 
 to mock, to be idle, to slander, to be avaricious, to take 
 what is anolher^s property, to be revengeful, unclean, 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 89 
 
 envious, to be superstitious, and to do any other wicked 
 action." 
 
 The religion of the Parsees seems to be an imperfect, 
 rather than an untrue religion. It is a relic of the re- 
 ligion of the primeval age, essentially the same as that 
 of the book of Job. From it we see, that for more 
 than three thousand years there has been no enlarge- 
 ment or development of religious truth, save in the line 
 of the prophecies fulfilled in the coming of the Lord, 
 and in the truth by him revealed. 
 
 Missionaries alleo^e that in the Parsee religion now, 
 there is an intermixture of superstition and idolatry : and 
 certainly there was in the religion of the Persians of 
 old. This is proved by the vision of Ezekiel, near the 
 time of Cyrus the Great, when the Persian religion was 
 less corrupt than it was afterwards. The prophet be- 
 held, in the Lord's house in Jerusalem, "creeping things 
 and abominable beasts " — the gods of the Egyptians ; 
 he beheld Hebrew " women weeping for Tammuz " — 
 the Phoenician worship of Adonis; and, "in the inner 
 court of the Lord's house, between the porch and the 
 altar," priests, with their backs towards the temple of 
 the Lord, and their faces towards the east," and "they 
 worshipped the sun," after the manner of the Magi.^ 
 This fixes the brand of idol-worship on the Magi, leav- 
 ing no doubt that in their religion, even as in that of 
 the Hebrews in Ezekiel's time, there was a fearful in- 
 termixture of idolatry with the worship of the God of 
 Heaven. 
 
 ^ Ezekiel, eh. viii. 
 
90 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 In the Persian religion there is some confirmation of 
 the fact, that the Pilgrims to Jerusalem were Persians ; 
 f<jr the reli<yious veneration of the Persians for their Kino; 
 is the starting-point in the full explanation of their wor- 
 ship of the Young Child. In the Old Testament, wor- 
 ship often means respect paid by an inferior person to a 
 superior, in the Oriental fashion of bowing or falling to 
 the ground ; but in the New Testament, with hardly 
 an exception, it means honor due only to God. Thus, 
 when Cornelius would have worshipped St. Peter in 
 this fashion, he restrained him, saying, "I am myself 
 a Man." ^ In a like case, the angel said to St. John, 
 Worship God." ^ " The four and twenty elders fell down 
 and worshipped Him that liveth forever and ever."^ 
 "When Satan said, "If thou wilt fall down and worship 
 me," our Lord answered, "It is written. Thou shalt wor- 
 ship the Lord thy God."* And in St. Matthew this 
 word must have this meaning, for it is the word he uses, 
 when he says, that after the Resurrection the disciples 
 worshipped Jesus, when he " came and spake unto them, 
 saying. All power is given unto me in heaven and in 
 earth; go ye, therefore, and teach all nations, baptizing 
 them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of 
 the Holy Ghost." 
 
 As to the worship the Magi paid to Christ, this great 
 difficulty arises : it is very strange they should receive a 
 truth received with difficulty, even by the disciples of 
 
 ^ Acts X. 25, 26. " Rev. xix. 10. 
 
 3 Rev. V. 14. * Matt. iv. 9, 10. 
 
 * Matt, xxviii. 19, 20. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 91 
 
 the Master, at a late day, and after many proofs of his 
 divinity. The explanation of the marvel is, in part, 
 given in what has been said of the Persian idea of a 
 King. To a Persian, his king was so representative of 
 God, that to his Oriental imagination, he seemed the 
 brightness of his glory and the image of his person. 
 The Persian Pilsrrims brous^ht with them to Bethlehem 
 somethino^ of this idea of a Kinfj;. This would have led 
 them to worship, in the Persian sense of the word, the 
 King they sought and found ; but their pure belief in 
 him as a spiritual Lord, and the new Star, the sign of 
 his super-terrestrial glory, that led to his presence, raised 
 their idea of him high above that of a king of the earth, 
 and prepared them to recognize his true, essential 
 divinity. 
 
 Their divinely-appointed recognition of the divinity 
 of the Lord, made before the time, and producing on 
 the instant only a religious awe and wonder in those 
 who heard of it, and made outside of the house of 
 Israel, corresponds to earlier revelations of the same fact 
 made within the house of Israel by the prophets, which 
 so rise above the idea of the Messiah that prevailed in 
 Israel at his birth. In either case, it was the sun 
 shining for an instant through clouds it was not till long 
 after to dispel from the face of heaven. 
 
 It having been proved that the Pilgrims to Jerusalem 
 were Persians, an inquiry as to that Pilgrimage is an 
 inquiry as to an event in the lives of the wisest and 
 best of the disciples of Zoroaster ; therefore I have 
 painted the Zoroastrian religion in the brightest colors 
 
92 CHARACTER AND RELIGION 
 
 it would bear ; but however much the shadows in the 
 picture may be darkened, it will still be more credible 
 that the Pilgrims St. Matthew describes were believers 
 in that than in any other religion. For the great truth, 
 that God is waging a real and universal war with Evil, 
 inclined its pious believers to watch earnestly to discern, 
 anywhere and everywhere, signs of his presence and 
 manifestations of his power. And, besides this, — the 
 central idea, the animating principle of this religion, — 
 there was a belief, also, peculiar to it, that looks like 
 one of the links of the chain we are trying to lay hold 
 of and to trace. It has often been said that all nations 
 looked back to a golden age, but none, save the He- 
 brews, looked forward to one — a most instructive 
 word ; but to it the Persians are the exception. 
 They believed that in the final triumph of the Good 
 Beinof the earth would be redeemed. In the Zenda- 
 vesta there is a fragment of a very old epic song, in 
 which it is foretold to Ahriman, that for the destruction 
 of idol-worshippera, Sosiosh shall be born out of the 
 water Kacoya, in the east country.^ This seems to be 
 a reference to one well known, rather than an announce- 
 ment of one unheard of before. In another place it is 
 said, this " hero will arise out of the number of the 
 prophets ; " " a mighty brightness," peculiar to Iranian 
 worthies of oldest time, "will shine around him," — 
 a mighty brightness, created by Ahura-Mazda in the 
 beginning, and the instrument by which Sosiosh would 
 accomplish his mission. This mission would be to 
 
 ^ Vendidad. Fargard, xix. 
 
OF THE PERSIANS. 93 
 
 make **Life everlasting, undecaying, imperishable, in- 
 corruptible, forever existing, forever vigorous, at the 
 time when the dead shall rise again." Then, it is said, 
 " imperishableness of life will exist ; and all the world 
 will remain for eternity in a state of purity."^ 
 
 The germ of the religion of the Lord Jesus Christ is 
 the promise his mercy gave to the mother of all human 
 kind. Are these words of the Persian religion a far-off 
 echo of that promise ? They are not among the very 
 oldest utterances of that religion. But of those, only 
 broken voices are now heard ; and whence came the Per- 
 sian worship of one God ? No people ever became idol- 
 aters, and of their own accord came back to his wor- 
 ship. The Persian worship of God, then, must have come 
 down to them from the time of Noah. But, as they 
 kept the truth of the Unity of God, transmitted to them 
 from before the Flood, why not some reminiscence of 
 the promise of a Kedeemer? It is possible their hope 
 originated in the belief in the Messiah, preserved by the 
 Hebrews ; it is possible it originated in some earnest 
 soul, kindling to ecstasy as it mused on the war of 
 Ormazd with Ahriman. It is possible both may have 
 concurred in Sfivino^ outline and color to some faint and 
 far reminiscence, till it reached its final, definite, and 
 grand form ; and such, it seems to me probable, was the 
 genesis and growth of this Persian oracle ; for, when 
 it is remembered that the appearance of the Persians, 
 as a people, was consequent upon their clinging to old 
 truth from which others were falling away ; that their 
 
 ^ Zemyad Yasht. 
 
94 CHARACTEK AND KELIGION 
 
 sacred traditions resemble the facts recorded in Genesis 
 more than do those of any other people ; that parts of 
 their sacred writings may be as old as the age of 
 Moses, and that, in them, they look back to a sacred 
 antiquity ; there seems much wisdom in the opinion of 
 the learned Hyde, that the Persians "semper ab ipso 
 diluvio veri Dei cultum tenuisse " — ever kept, even 
 from the flood, the worship of the true God. 
 
 In searching for a cause of a pilgrimage of Magi to 
 Jerusalem, it is encouraging to find in their sacred 
 books a prediction of a Redeemer to come. We must 
 inquire farther why they gave to such a hope a local 
 habitation outside of the land and the race of Iran ; but, 
 if there was some relation between the Iranian hope and 
 the first promise to man, there was a divine appropriate- 
 ness in the fulfilling of that promise, when Magi, whose 
 symbol of the Evil One was a serpent, fell down and 
 worshipped " the Seed of the Woman." 
 
THE JVIAGI. 95 
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 THE MAGI. 
 
 With the fact that the Pilgrims to Bethlehem were 
 Persians, the religion of Persia agrees better than 
 would that of any other ancient country — Rome, 
 Greece, or Egypt, for instance — with the notion that 
 they came from thence ; and so, too, the character of 
 the Magi agrees better with the fact that these Pilgrims 
 were Magi, than would the character of any other 
 ancient priesthood with the notion that they belonged 
 to them. 
 
 The history of the Magi is very imperfect, but the 
 testimony to their character, given in many brief ref- 
 erences to them, is so much in their favor, as to make 
 up on this point for the loss of the classical treatises 
 that spake at length, or especially, concerning them.^ 
 Thus, Philo Jud{3eus "deplores the deficiency of wisdom 
 
 ^ The writers of these were Ctesias (B. C. 400), physician 
 to King Artaxerxes ; Deiiion (B. C. 340) ; Theopompiis of 
 Chios (B. C. 350), who, in the eighth book of his History of 
 Philip of Maceclon, treated of the Magi ; and Hermippos 
 (B C. 350) , who also wrote of them. References to, and fra^r- 
 ments of their works, are to be found in Plutarch, Diogenes 
 Laertius, and Pliny. Hang thinks Hermippos had read the 
 books of the Magi. 
 
96 THE MAGI. 
 
 in the human race, the slackness in the pursuit of those 
 objects to which we ought to hasten eagerly, the indo- 
 lence through which the seeds of virtue perish ; while 
 for those things which we ought to forego, we show 
 an insatiate longing ; whence it is that the earth is full 
 of men who indulge in all kinds of pleasure, while the 
 number of the prudent and just is small ; " and then 
 says, "still, there are some virtuous and honorable 
 men : of such, among the Persians, are the Magi ; who, 
 investigating the works of nature for the purpose of be- 
 coming acquainted with the truth, become initiated them- 
 selves, and initiate others in the divine virtues."^ Thus, 
 in the Wisdom of Solomon, it seems to be said of the 
 Magi, " They seek for God ; being conversant in His 
 works, they search for Him diligently."^ 
 
 ^ Philo. Quod omnis probus liber ; sec. xi. 
 
 ^ Chap. xiii. 7. Here might be cited Justin Martyr, who 
 says of the priests of Mithra, — Mithraism was a late and 
 corrupt phase of the Zoroastrian religion, — "They teach 
 the practice of what is just and right" (Dialogue with 
 Trypho, sec. Ixx.), though with the zeal of a new convert, and 
 uttering the Christian opinion of his time, he refers this to 
 the subtilty of evil spirits, who, in this and like cases, he 
 thinks, counterfeited the good that really was in the true 
 religion alone. 
 
 Of heathen writers, Plato, in the passage referred to in 
 note on p. 98, leaves on the mind a good impression as to 
 the Magi. Diogenes Laertius, in his History, if so it may 
 be called, of Ancient Philosophy, says, " The Magi dis- 
 course to the people concerning justice." i. 6. So, too, 
 Dion Chrysostom, Oratio Borysthenica. Apuleius says, 
 " The religion of the Magi is acceptable to the immortal 
 
THE MAGI. 97 
 
 The name Masfi comes from a word found in one of 
 the most ancient hymns of the Zendavesta. " Kava 
 Yistaspa " — the royal friend of Zoroaster — " obtained, 
 through the possession of the spiritual power (Maga) , 
 and through the verses which the good mind had re- 
 vealed, that knowledge which the Living Wise, himself 
 the cause of truth, had invented."^ The same word, 
 also, appears in a name given in the Zendavesta to the 
 earliest disciples of Zoroaster. " Zarathustra assigned 
 in times of yore to the Magavash Paradise."^ Hence, 
 not inappropriately, was the name Magi given by the 
 Greeks to those who, from immemorial time, had been 
 pri'ests of the Persians.^ Like the names Persia and 
 Zoroaster, it originated in a Persian word ; but, like 
 them, it is a European name. 
 
 Among the Persians there could be no religious 
 
 gods, pious undoubtedly, and divinely wise." Of much the 
 same import is what is said of the Persian Magi by the Greek 
 grammarians, Hesychius and Suidas, who define them much 
 in the same way, the last as " lovers of wisdom and servants 
 of God." 
 
 1 Gatha, iii. 51, 16. ^ xhe same, 15. 
 
 ^ Prof Plumptre, article 3fagi, Smith's Dictionary, says, 
 " The word Magi does not appear in the Zendavesta." This 
 should be compared with the citations above. Westergaard 
 says, '' Their name occurs twice only in all the extant Zend 
 texts." Haug, b. iii. sec. 8, p. 160, in a note on "Maga- 
 vash," see above, says, " This is the original form of Magi. 
 Its form in the cuneiform inscriptions is Magush. Accord- 
 insr to this verse, it seems to have denoted the followers of 
 Zoroaster." In the Zendavesta, the word for priests is 
 Atharvan, guardians of the fire. 
 7 
 
98 THE MAGI. 
 
 service without the presence of one of the Magi.^ The 
 learned heads of the order had the charge of the edu- 
 cation of the monarch.^ They were judges and coun- 
 sellors of state. The Magi were diviners, astrologers, 
 and interpreters of dreams.^ They searched into the 
 secrets of future time. They professed to utter the 
 will of God. The order was to Persia, what Delphos 
 w^as to Greece. It was the Persian oracle. 
 
 ^ Without one of the Magi, it is not lawful for the Per- 
 sians to sacrifice. — Herodotus, i. 132. The Magi are em- 
 ployed in worshipping the gods by prayers and sacrifices, as 
 if their worship alone would be accepted. — Diogenes Laer- 
 tius, i. 6. According to this writer, their dress was white, 
 their habits ascetic, and they lived on a vegetable diet. 
 
 ^ Plato states, that the education of the Persian prince was 
 intrusted to the four of the Persians who severally excelled 
 in wisdom, justice, temperance, and fortitude. The first of 
 these taught him the mageia of Zoroaster, by which is meant 
 the worship of the gods, and likewise the art of kingly 
 government. The second taught him to be true in word and 
 deed through his whole life. The third to govern his appe- 
 tites instead of being their slave. The fourth taught him 
 to be fearless and brave, since he who fears is a slave. 
 
 — Alcibiades, 37. 
 
 ^ Herodotus relates several instances of this. One is as fol- 
 lows : A vision appeared to Xerxes in his sleep, which the 
 Magi, when they heard it, interpreted to relate to the whole 
 world, and to signify that all mankind should serve him. 
 The vision was as follows : Xerxes imagined that he was 
 crowned with the sprig of an olive tree, and that branches 
 from this olive covered the whole earth ; and that after- 
 wards the crown that was placed on his head disappeared. 
 
 — vii. 19. 
 
THE MAGI. 99 
 
 In the loss of all but one of the books of the Zenda- 
 vesta,^ it is impossible to form a full and clear idea of 
 science of the Magi. But the art of the Persians, as 
 shown in architecture, sculpture, gem-engraving, coins, 
 and utensils, seems not to have fallen short of that of 
 the Assyrians, the Babylonians, or the Egyptians ; and 
 their leading scientific ideas, no doubt, were those essen- 
 tially common to the scientific thought of the earliest 
 cycle of civilization. If so, they held that the forms 
 of all material things are but the protean changes in 
 one and the same primordial substance, produced by 
 
 ^ Iq its largest compass of meaDing, the word Zeadavesta 
 denotes a priestly literature that was the growth of centu- 
 ries. It resembled the Talmud of the Jews. Its twenty-one 
 books, or nosJcs, set forth the religious traditions, opinions, 
 rites, and ceremonies of the Medes and Persians, and also 
 their philosophical and scientific notions. The table of its 
 contents is still extant, and is as follows : B. I. Praise 
 and Worship of the Angels. 11. Prayers and Instructions 
 as to good actions, chiefly those to induce one to assist a 
 fellow-man. III. On Abstinence, Piety, Religion, the 
 qualities of Zoroaster. IV. An Explanation of Religious 
 Duties. On the Orders and on Commandments of God. 
 Obedience in Man. How to guard against Hell, and how to 
 reach Heaven. V. On the Knowledge of this and the other 
 Life. Qualities of the Inhabitants of the other Worlds. Reve- 
 lations as to Heaven, Earth, Water, Trees, Fire, Men 
 and Beasts. On the Resurrection of the Dead, and the 
 crossing chinvat (i. e. the bridge over which the soul passed 
 into heaven). VI. On Astronomy, Geography, Astrology. 
 VII. On the Reward in the next World for observing the 
 two chief Festivals. VIII. Of Kings, High-priests. What 
 Fishes are Ormazd's and what Ahriman's. A Geographical 
 
100 THE MAGI. 
 
 the play of one and the same force ; and then* aim was 
 to pierce through the forms to the substance, and in its 
 changes, to grasp that mysterious principle that ever 
 eluded them in its rapid transformations. Hence their 
 science dealt with the occult, the magical, or, at least, 
 the mysterious ; yet, its main ideas were those to which 
 the inductive science of the modern world seems to be 
 slowly working its cautious and toilsome way, to prove 
 which seems now the far-off goal of its farthest aspira- 
 tion ; and Sir Walter Raleigh may have been right 
 when he said, "A magician, according to the Persian 
 
 Section. IX. A Code for Kings and Governors. On 
 Workmanship of various Kinds. On the Sin of Lying. X. 
 On Metaphysics, Natural Philosophy, Divinity. XI. Ou 
 the Reign of Gustasp, his Conversion to Religion, and its 
 Propagation by him throughout the World. XII. The Na- 
 ture of the Divine Being. The Zoroastrian Faith ; Duties 
 enjoined by it. On Obedience due to the King. On Re- 
 wards for good Actions in the other World, and how to be 
 saved from Hell. The Structure of the World, Agricul- 
 ture, Botany. On the Classes of the Nation, Rulers, War- 
 riors, Agriculturists, Traders, and Workmen. XIII. Ou 
 the Miracles of Zoroaster. XIV. On Human Life, from its 
 Birth up to its End, and to the Day of Resurrection. On the 
 Causes of Man's Birth ; why some are born in Wealth, others 
 in Poverty. XV. The Praise of angel-like Men. XVI 
 Code of Laws, what is allowed and what prohibited. XVII. 
 Medicine, Astronomy, Midwifery. XVIII. On Marriage 
 between near Relatives, Zoology and Treatment of Animals. 
 XIX. Civil and Criminal Laws, Boundaries of Countries. 
 On the Resurrection. XX. Ou the Removal of Unclean- 
 ness, from which great Defects arise in the World. XXI. 
 Ou the Creation : its Wonders and Structures. 
 
THE MAGI. 101 
 
 word, is no other than Divinorum cultor ef intevpres^ a 
 studious observer and expounder of divine things, and 
 that art itself (I mean the art of natural magic) no other 
 quam naturalis philosophicie ahsoluta consummation 
 than the absolute perfection of natural philosophy." 
 
 The word Magic, common to many languages, is 
 curious evidence that the Magi sometimes abused their 
 propensity to search into mysterious things. Pliny 
 says, " Beyond all doubt in Persia, from Zoroaster, as 
 all authors agree, arose magic — fraudulentissima 
 artiiim — the most delusive of arts." But he admits 
 that it was born of the medical art, and made its way 
 veliit altiorem sanctioremque medicinam, — " as a 
 very high and sacred art of healing ; " and that it 
 blended with it " natural philosophy and religion, and 
 so bound men in a triple chain." ^ 
 
 Magic arts are as old as superstition. Where the 
 one was in the ancient world — and it was everywhere 
 — there was the other. The Magi were from imme- 
 morial time. Their rites were conversant with the 
 secrets of nature, and with spirits, genii, apd angels. 
 Hence mao-ic was thouoht to have orio^inated with 
 them. But assuredly they did not originate the magic 
 of Egypt, or of India. Their invocations of the ele- 
 ments, of the powers of nature, of beneficent spirits, 
 genii, or angels, was white magic, resorted to to counter- 
 act the power of demons. Black magic — evil spells, 
 wicked enchantments, invocation of devils, marked the 
 
 ^ See Pliny's Nat. Hist., lib. xxx. 
 
102 THE MAGI. 
 
 followers of Ahriman, and were forbidden in the Zen- 
 davesta. 
 
 The moral pre-eminence of the Magi above the 
 ancient heathen priesthoods was chiefly owing to the 
 spirituality of the Zoroastrian religion. Into its other 
 causes it is in vain to inquire minutely. Something of 
 it must have been due to the providential ordering of 
 events in the unknown of their history ; something to 
 earnest and good men, whose record on earth has 
 perished ; and it may have been in part owing to the 
 fact that, unlike the other ancient nations, the Medes 
 and Persians had no grand and imposing system of tem- 
 ple-worship. For, hke the castles of the nobles in the 
 Dark Ages, the temples of the heathen priesthoods were 
 the strongholds by means of which they gained and 
 kept much of their power. The shrine, hallowed by 
 the present god, lent them something of its awe-in- 
 spiring power, and this power they were tempted to 
 maintain and auo^ment bv artifice and trick. Herodotus 
 says the Persians had no temples.^ This has been de- 
 nied, but from his point of view he was right. He 
 was thinking of shrines enriched with the gifts of kings, 
 the wealth of nations, with choirs of ministering priests, 
 and throngs of devotees ; of vast edifices, such as he had 
 seen in all his travels in Greece, Asia Minor, Egypt, 
 and Babylon ; — a fire-chapel, with no images, no array 
 of robed priests, no crowd of worshippers, no imposing 
 ceremonial, he did not think a Temple.^ 
 
 ^ Herodotus, book i. 131. 
 
 ^ This idea is very well illustrated, as well as confirmed 
 
THE MAGI. 103 
 
 The high religious function of the Persian monarch, 
 and the free genius of the people — of all Asiatics the 
 least likely to become the slaves of their priests — re- 
 pressed in the Magi that insatiate lust for power which 
 led the priesthood in some ancient nations to attempt to 
 overawe the throne, and to enslave the popular mind.^ 
 The Magi had no element of power for personal ends 
 like the shrine of Delphos, or of Thebes. Like the 
 Jews, at times, they were infected with idolatry ; they 
 were guilty of some dark and cruel deeds ; their re- 
 ligion had a tinge of element worship, a taint of poly- 
 theism ; yet from superstitious and idolatrous practices, 
 they could draw little power compared with the priests 
 of other nations. Their temptations were less, their 
 faith was more spiritual. 
 
 As there is in the character of each nation something, 
 often very undefinable, that differentiates it from that 
 of every other nation, so there is in the great religious 
 orders of the ancient world, — as there is in those of 
 Christendom. This may be owing to an evident excess 
 or deficiency in some common element, to some well- 
 known national trait, or to something peculiar in origin, 
 
 by this sentence from Eraser's History of Persia, ch. iv. 
 " The Parsees have no temples. The Atish-Khiidars are 
 merely edifices for guarding the sacred fire from defilement 
 or pollution." 
 
 ^ Under Smerdis the Magi seem to have made one grand 
 effort in that direction, and afterwards to have rested in 
 their appropriate calling. 
 
104 THE MAGI. 
 
 history, or aim, and so at once be clear to the mind; 
 but oftentimes this element of difference is an intanc^i- 
 ble, an almost inexpressible, thing, for our first clear 
 perception of which we may be as much indebted to 
 chance, as to patience of thought, — as we sometimes 
 mark what we are looking to find, by a glance of the 
 eye in the midst of diligent searching. It may be felt 
 rather than known, but a difference there always is ; 
 no two are just alike ; and this distinguishing differ- 
 ence is usually their most valuable or interesting charac- 
 teristic. What, then, was the distinguishing character- 
 istic of the Magi ? 
 
 In all the religious orders of the ancient heathen 
 world, there was somewhat of a scientific and of a 
 philosophic spirit. Their temples were colleges, as well 
 as shrines. The Magi, also, were learned ; but their 
 spirit was not distinctively the scientific. They were 
 philosophers ; but their spirit was not distinctively the 
 philosophical. Science seeks fur law in natural phe- 
 nomena, and, finding this, seeks no further. Philoso- 
 phy seeks for abstract truth, a mere notion of the 
 mind. There is a spirit that avails itself of science 
 and philosophy for an end beyond either ; a spirit 
 that would pierce into the secrets of the Being who is 
 above nature, and who gives to truth, reality. Some- 
 thing of this spirit was the distinguishing character- 
 istic of the Magi. In nature they ever sought for 
 revelations of the supernatural ; in human affairs, of 
 the superhuman. 
 
THE MAGI. 105 
 
 Now this spirit may be in alliance with that fear of 
 the Lord which is the beginning of wisdom, or with 
 unhallowed presumption. It may seek for God in the 
 spirit of Babel or of Bethel, of Balaam or of Elijah. 
 There is no sufficient evidence of holiness of heart in 
 thoughts that "wander through eternity," aspiring to 
 the highest mysteries. They are evidence only of a 
 sensitiveness to spiritual impressions. They are the 
 outworkings of a temperament that may determine 
 either to superstition or to reverence, that may belong 
 to a wizard, or to a prophet. And no doubt, there 
 would be abounding evidence of this in the history of 
 the order of the Magi, were it as complete as it is, and 
 ever must be, imperfect. 
 
 The Magi were priests of the most philosophical and 
 profound of the religions of the world ; yet from the 
 first, and at their best estate, there must have been two 
 tendencies at work in them, — for such is the nature of 
 man — one towards the earthly, one towards the spir- 
 itual. During their comparative depression, while the 
 Persians were ruled by alien tribes, and their religion 
 was losing much of its simplicity and purity, both may 
 have grown intense ; so that when the coming of the 
 Redeemer drew nigh, as among the Jews, so among 
 the Magi, the few may have grown more spiritual, as 
 the many grew more earthly. 
 
 But there were then on earth, none, from whom so 
 appropriately might have come the witnesses of the 
 grace of God to all the earth. As there was an ele- 
 
106 THE MAGI. 
 
 ment of faith in the relio'ion and science of the Mao^i, 
 as in the realms of matter and of spirit they sought 
 for the divine, as some of them aimed at dominion 
 over nature, though with impossible aspirations, yet 
 with good ends, it accords with the harmonies of the 
 Kingdom of Grace, that God led Magi to the True 
 Magician. 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND IIEBEEWS. 107 
 
 CHAPTEE V. 
 
 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 
 
 Though Asia is distinguished from Europe by en- 
 thusiasm, though it has ever been a land of seers and 
 f)rophets, true or false, a land of vows, and shrines and 
 pilgrimages ; though the long sanctity of Jerusalem made 
 it — longe clar^issima urbium Orientis, 7io)i Jiuleoe 
 modo^ — by far the most illustrious city, not of Judea 
 only, but of all Syria ; yet a Persian pilgrimage to Jeru- 
 salem would be wanting in historic credibility, if the 
 Persians knew nothing of the Hebrews : on the other 
 hand, if they knew them well, or even nations well 
 acquainted with them, then, in view of the Hebrew pre- 
 vision of the Messiah, such a pilgrimage is possible. 
 
 Of the countries west of the Euphrates neither the 
 Persians nor the Medes could have had much, if any, 
 personal knowledge, before the wars that resulted in the 
 Persian Empire. These opened the Magian mind to 
 foreign influences, and enlarged its circle of thought. 
 They brought the Magi in contact with races, among 
 whom there were sacred traditions of high antiquity ; 
 and a word or two, as to some facts of this kind, may 
 
 ^ Pliny, Xat, Plist, lib. v. 15. 
 
108 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 
 
 well introduce what I have to say of their acquaintance 
 with the Hebrews. 
 
 The earlier conquests of the Medes, and afterwards 
 of the Persians, led them into the Great Plain of the 
 Tigris and the Euphrates. One of the earliest perma- 
 nent settlements of the human race was in that ever- 
 afterwards historic Plain ; and somewhere between those 
 Rivers was the cradle of the Hebrew race : — as lan- 
 guage witnesses, — for one of the languages of that 
 region, the Aramaic, was like that of the Hebrews, and, 
 in the time of their Captivity, it became the language 
 spoken by them. There the sacred traditions that 
 crossed the Flood, came down in an unbroken line to 
 their great Ancestor ; and there " in IMesopotamia, in 
 the land of the Chaldeans, the God of glory appeared 
 unto Abraham."^ 
 
 As the sacred memories known to him — the same 
 written in the early chapters of Genesis — were not lost 
 in his family in its long sojourn in Egypt, why should 
 they have been wholly lost, for a long time, in Chaldea? 
 Abraham's father, Terah, and brother, Nachor, " served 
 other gods ; " ^ but this is not altogether inconsistent 
 with their retaining much of primal tradition ; and the 
 notion that they were utterly given over to idolatry, 
 agrees not with Abraham's saying, in his old age, to 
 "the eldest servant of his house, go unto my country 
 and to my kindred, and take a wife unto my son Isaac." ^ 
 
 ^ See Acts vii. 2, 4. " Joshua xxiv. 2. 
 
 ^ Gen. xxiv. 2? 4« 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 109 
 
 Isaac, too, in his old age, sent Jacob to the forefathers' 
 land ; and there, all the Fathers of the Twelve Tribes 
 save one, were born. 
 
 The children of Abraham dwelt far westward of " the 
 land of their kindred ; " and, for a long time, it is seen 
 no more on the sacred page ; but when seen again, it is 
 instructive to mark the appearing of something hinting 
 affinity between the people by the rivers of Mesopota- 
 mia, and the Hebrews. To a man of Gath-hepher, 
 of the tribe of Zebulon, a dweller by what was after- 
 wards called the Sea of Galilee, came the word of the 
 Lord, Go and warn the people of Nineveh. That this 
 command seemed strange to a Hebrew, may well be 
 inferred from Jonah's flight from the presence of the 
 Lord ; but far more strange it would have been, had 
 there not been something in the history of his people 
 tending to explain it ; and such appears, if, as there is 
 every reason to believe and none to doubt, the wonders 
 of their story, which now reverberate through all the 
 world, rolled in ancient times through all the East. 
 This, in part, explains the sending of Jonah to the 
 men of Nineveh, and the power of his warnings. 
 Their fathers had told them of him who went forth out 
 of Mesopotamia, and of the wondrous fortunes of his 
 race ; they had listened long for some voice to speak to 
 them from those high places, where this mysterious 
 people worshipped ; and when, at last, a Hebrew, 
 marshalled by no array of miracles, but mighty in the 
 traditional glory of his lineage, preached to them re- 
 pentance, Nineveli believed God. 
 
110 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBllEWS. 
 
 The fact that Babylon was in that part of the world 
 from whence their sacred traditions came to the He- 
 brews, together with that of the extreme antiquity of 
 the city, becomes of some interest to us, when the 
 Magi become acquainted with those " wise men " of 
 Babylon, called Chaldeans, alike in sacred and in pro- 
 fjine history.^ Though it is only a little while before 
 the Captivity that in the Scriptures Babylon is " the 
 beauty of the Chaldee's excellency,"^ it is also named 
 as a City in the third generation after the Patriarch 
 Noah ; ^ and it was received as a fact among the Greeks, 
 that for 1903 years before its conquest by Alexander 
 the Great (B. C. 331), astronomical observations had 
 been made and recorded in that city.* This seems to 
 
 ^ Who the Chaldean people were, and whether they found- 
 ed Babylon, or possessed it by conquest, are questions more 
 or less in doubt ; but it seems certain that they adopted the 
 language of the Babylonian region, and that " the tongue of 
 the Chaldeans " (Dan. i. 4), hke the Latin language in the 
 Middle Ages, at length became the exclusive possession of 
 the learned class, from this fact called Chaldeans. 
 
 ^ Isa. xiii. 19. 
 
 3 Gen. X. 10. 
 
 ^ It is at least remarkable that these two dates give the 
 year B. C. 2234, which the Chaldean Berosus fixes upon as 
 the commencement of the Chaldean Dynasty in Babylon. 
 See Rawlinson, Herodotus, vol. i. Essay vi. Grote (History 
 of Greece, part ii. ch. xix.), in a valuable note, says, 
 " The earliest Chaldean astronomical observation known to 
 the astronomer Ptolemy, botli precise and of ascertained 
 date to a degree sufficient for scientific use, was a lunar 
 eclipse of the 19th of March, 721 B. C. . . . That the 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. Ill 
 
 prove, there must have ever been in that ancient city a 
 learned class with an unbroken succession ; and — 
 whether the learned " Chaldeans " were coeval with the 
 city or not — in ancient times the learned and the 
 priestly class were the same, and as the Chaldeans pre- 
 served the scientific, so they must have preserved, also, 
 the sacred traditions of Babylon and the region round 
 about ; and thus their sacred traditions must have, 
 more or less, resembled those that came down throuo'h 
 the Patriarchs to the Hebrews. 
 
 By the Greeks, the Chaldeans were sometimes spoken 
 
 Chaldeans had been, long before this period, in the habit of 
 observing the heavens, there is no reason to doubt ; and the 
 exactness of those observations cited by Ptolemy implied 
 (according to the judgment of Ideler) long previous practice. 
 . . . There seem to have been Chaldean observations, both 
 made and recorded, of much greater antiquity than 721 
 B. C, though we cannot lay much stress on the date of 1903 
 anterior to Alexander the Great, which is mentioned by 
 Simplicius (ad Aristot. de Coelo, p. 123) as being the earliest 
 period of the Chaldean observations sent from Babylon by 
 Callisthenes to Aristotle. Ideler thinks that the Chaldean 
 observations, anterior to 721 B. C, were useless to astrono- 
 mers from the want of some fixed era, or definite cycle, to 
 identify the date of each of them. ... It is to be noted 
 that Ptolemy always cited the Chaldean observations as 
 made by ' the Chaldeans^* never naming any individual ; 
 though, in all the other observations to which he alludes, he 
 is very scrupulous in particularizing the name of the ob- 
 server. Doubtless he found the Chaldean observations 
 registered in just this manner." 
 
112 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 
 
 of as a kind of Magi,^ from some general resemblance 
 as diviners ; and the Greek translation of the Hebrew 
 Bible, in rendering the terms that in the Book of 
 Daniel denote the classes of the Wise Men of Babylon, 
 uses the term Man^i.^ There is nothinor in the Hebrew 
 
 CD O 
 
 that authorizes this, and it may have come from the 
 difficulty of finding in the Greek, words answering to 
 the five distinctions in the Hebrew text. No doubt this 
 use of the word for persons living in the East, was one 
 of the reasons why St. Matthew, when he used the title 
 Magi, added to it "from the Far East."^ 
 
 Still, in itself, it is probable that, long before the time 
 of Cyrus, there were some of the true Magi in multi- 
 tudinous Babylon. For Magian rites were known as 
 far west as Jerusalem before the captivity ; * and 
 
 ^ So Hesychius. la the Greek version of Gen. xli. 8, by 
 Symmachus, the word Magi is foiiDd where the LXX. read 
 interpreters ; and the English version reads, Pharaoh " called 
 for all the magicians of Egypt, and all the wise men thereof." 
 
 The evidence tending to prove the learned Chaldeans a 
 species of Magi, is in resemblances that prove nothing, and 
 in the fact that when " the king of Jerusalem and his men 
 of war fled forth out of the city," and " all the princes of 
 the king of Babylon came and sat in the middle gate," with 
 them came one, styled Rab-mag, a title in which the Persian 
 word for priest is thought to appear, though this is very 
 doubtful. Jer. xxxix. 3, 4. 
 
 2 Dan. i. 20 ; ii. 2, 27 ; iv. 4. 
 
 ^ The Septuagint seems to have been In common use 
 with the Palestinian Jews, as well as with those of other 
 countries. 
 
 * See ch. iii. pp. 88, 89. 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 113 
 
 throughout Western Asia, even in times ahiiost beyond 
 the reach of history, there seems to have been a degree 
 of intercourse and of mutual influence ; social, political, 
 and religious resemblances ; and wars, conquests, and 
 dynasties, whose memory has nearly or quite perished.^ 
 
 The order of the Chaldeans continued under the 
 Persians ; for when Alexander made his entry into 
 Babylon, part of its citizens, says Quintus Curtius, 
 crowded together on the wall, eager to see the new 
 monarch, and a still greater multitude went forth to 
 meet him ; of these were the Magi — suo more ^atrium 
 carmen canentes — " accordino; to their custom sino^ins: 
 their ancient hymns ; " after whom the Chaldeans, with 
 their instruments of music, came. He describes these 
 as priests of the Babylonians, and savans, who taught 
 the times and motions of the stars. ^ 
 
 When Alexander entered Babylon, he doubtless felt 
 as we all feel, that then he was monarch of the East — 
 so much by far the greatest city of the Persian Empire 
 was Babylon. Even under the Persians, the Chaldeans 
 there could not have been much inferior to the Magi ; 
 and Cyrus and his successors, no doubt, gave the 
 learned and religious order of the Imperial City ^ some- 
 
 ^ Chedorlaomer's expeditioQ from beyond the Tigris to 
 the Dead Sea, illustrates this, (Gen. xiv. 1-5) ; and the 
 statement of Berosus, that the first Dynasty in Babylon, was 
 Median. 
 
 ^ Historia Alexandri Magni, lib. v. 1. Chaldeei, Baby- 
 loniorumque non vates modo, sed etiam artifices . . . side- 
 rum motus et status temporum vices ostendere. 
 
 ^ It was the residence of the Persian court for part of the 
 year. 8 
 
114 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND IIEBllEWS. 
 
 thing of the consideration they gave the learned and 
 religious order of their empire.^ 
 
 The traditions of the Chaldeans were more like those 
 of the Hebrews than were those of any people except 
 the Persians — a fact not inconsistent with their gross 
 idolatry. With a corrupt worship, much historical re- 
 ligious truth may long be preserved. In the ancient 
 nations much of true religion survived, side by side 
 with false religion ; but the imposing ceremonial and 
 enduring monuments of the corrupt, popular worship 
 receive a larger place in history, than the less imposing 
 truth, which they now overshadow historically, as once 
 they did really, and in every way tend to efface from 
 the human memory. 
 
 Whatever the relations of Magi and Chaldeans be- 
 fore the Persian conquest, after that epoch, in spite of 
 the rivalry, jealousy, and contention there must have 
 been between them, they more or less fraternized in 
 Babylon; for in those days, the wise sought knowl- 
 edge, not so much from books, as in the truer mode of 
 intercourse with the wise ; and the fragments of Chal- 
 dean philosophy show a likeness to that of the Magi 
 caused by, or the cause of, much intercourse between 
 them. 
 
 This is the more probable when we consider the ef- 
 fect on the Magi of the change relatively to the civiliza- 
 tions of the world, wrought for them by the wars that 
 
 ^ Under the Greeks the Chaldeans, like the Magi, lost 
 caste ; and in the Western world, their name also was at 
 length assumed hy those who made it a reproach. 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBliEWS. 115 
 
 began with Cyrus. The day of Persian glory, ushered 
 in by his martial genius, was full of rousing events. 
 If noio the Persians were to come forth from their high- 
 lands, possess again the Plain of the Tigris and the 
 Euphrates, seize Damascus, Bey root, and Jerusalem ; 
 hold Alexandria, the Suez Canal and the valley of the 
 Kile, it would electrify the world ; yet it would not 
 equal the exploits of Cyrus and Cambyses. The cities 
 they stormed and took were greater, they overran 
 countries more thickly peopled, the civilizations they 
 beheld were more gorgeous, the shock of ideas greater. 
 But for the fable of India, and for Athens, the Persian 
 Empire embraced all there was of civilization. For 
 one brilliant moment the Persian, like the Greek after- 
 w^ards, and the Roman, at a still later day, was the 
 central man of the world. It is not given us to call 
 up with equal vividness his elder empire ; yet the Per- 
 sian, thouofh as the elder his civilization was less 
 varied, is not less worthy of study than the Greek or 
 the Roman ; and, in influence on the course of human 
 events, is next to the Hebrew. 
 
 That early cycle of civilization, which included Egypt, 
 Assyria, Babylonia, and Persia, was characterized by 
 power. All its monuments are colossal. In Titanic 
 strength the Persian was not equal to the Egyptian, or 
 to the Chaldean ; in intellect he was their superior. 
 The Majrian relioion is a more wonderful fact than the 
 wall of Babylon. It is a monument to the Magian 
 intellect, lasting as the Pyramids ; and we may be sure 
 the men who wrought out this religion, felt the mental 
 
116 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 
 
 excitement of the stirring period of the Persian Empire, 
 may be sure, their quick, inquisitive, appreciating eyes 
 marked the confluence of streams of truth in Babylon, 
 the meeting there of agreeing lines of old-world tra- 
 ditions, and earnestly searched into their resemblances 
 and differences. 
 
 '^^The king of Babylon made a Hebrew, the President 
 of the Chaldeans. The Chaldee passed, the Persian 
 came. The Magi took the place of the Chaldeans, as 
 the imperial order ; the new monarch raised the same 
 Hebrew to a rank above both ; and these learned and 
 religious orders were brought together, in the metropo- 
 lis of the world, under the same illustrious foreigner. 
 Then to the Magi, who brought with them the traditions 
 of Bactria, far in the East, were brought the traditions 
 of Judea, far in the West ; and, at this epoch in its 
 history, this order embodied the wisdom of the East 
 — Bactrian, Median, Persian, Chaldean, Aramean, and 
 Hebraic. 
 
 The thouerht we have s^iven to the relations of the 
 IVIaori with the Chaldeans, recalls how much of truth 
 must have survived in Western Asia in the day of 
 Cyrus ; how events then liberalized the Magian mind, 
 and opened it to quick and deep impressions ; but these 
 things have for us only a general interest. No doubt 
 the Magi compared their own religion, even as their 
 science and art, with that of the Babylonians ; but their 
 own reminiscences of the truth were more truthful, 
 and their religion more pure ; yet these researches may 
 
PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 117 
 
 have fitted some of them to mark and appreciate the 
 fact that this was reversed, when they came to search 
 into the faith of the race of Abraham. 
 
 In the historic cycles of the ancient world, wherever 
 the centre of power is, there the Hebrew is sure to be, 
 and sure to draw to himself the chief interest. So it 
 is on the shores of the Nile, by the rivers of Babylon, 
 and in the palace of the Great King in Shushan. With 
 this people the true interest of history begins ; and 
 it seems ordained that it shall never afterwards be 
 wholly separate from them. The predestined end of 
 the culture of the Greeks, was reached when Hebrew 
 Evangelists and Apostles made their language imperish- 
 able ; and the most interesting ruin in Rome is the 
 arch commemorating the ruin of Jerusalem, so closely 
 connected with its own. Is Babylon, then, the centre 
 and height of dominion? the Hebrew will be there. 
 Is another world-power rising on its ruin? there he 
 will be also. 
 
 The king of Assyria, who carried away the Ten 
 Tribes as captives^ into the East (B. C. 721), colonized 
 some of them in towns of his subjects, the Medes. 
 A little more than a century afterwards the king of 
 Babylon led away captive the people of Judea.^ "By 
 the rivers of Babylon there they sat down, yea, they 
 wept when they remembered Zion." In that same 
 hour, beyond the eastern mountains that looked down 
 
 ^ 2 Kings xvii. 6. ^ 2 Kings xxv. 8, 11. 
 
118 PERSIANS, CHALDEANS, AND HEBREWS. 
 
 on the scene of their exile, the Lord was preparing the 
 humiliation of their oppressors, and their restoration to 
 the Holy City by him, whom in a preceding genera- 
 tion he had foretold by name — " Cyrus, the Man from 
 the Far East." 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 119 
 
 CHAPTER VI. 
 
 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 Cyrus made a royal decree that the Temple of God 
 in Jerusalem should be rebuilt. Few facts in history 
 are more certain and less likely than this. For the 
 country of the Jews was far off and small. Their num- 
 bers were inconsiderable. Their lano^uao^e was unintel- 
 ligible to Cyrus. He knew them only as slaves of 
 those he himself had enslaved. 
 
 Palestine, a high entrenched fort on the borders of the 
 Great Western Sea, commanding the approaches to and 
 from Egypt, was invaluable to the security of their Em- 
 pire, if garrisoned by a people bound to the Persians by 
 strong ties of gratitude ; but this did not appear until wars 
 and reverses later than the reign of Cyrus. His decree 
 was for the rebuilding of the Temple only. It was not 
 until the fourth reign afterwards that Persia suffered the 
 Jews to inclose the strong site of Jerusalem with a wall. 
 Until this was done neither the Temple, nor the small 
 population that gathered round it, was safe from ene- 
 mies round about, — from the Samaritan, and from 
 the Ammonite, from the Philistine and from the Arab.^ 
 
 1 Neh. iv. 7. 
 
120 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 Not until they had once more a stronghold could the 
 Jews, or their enemies, feel they were again a people. 
 Hence the bitter wrath of their foes at the building of 
 the ^Vall, and the haste of the work " when the build- 
 ers, every one, had his sword girded by his side," and 
 half of the men " labored in the w^ork, and half of them 
 held the spears, from the rising of the morning till the 
 stars appeared.^" In those days, there could no more be 
 a city without walls tlian without people ; and the time 
 of the building of the wall was the date of the renewal 
 of Jerusalem. Not, therefore, from the decree for the 
 rebuilding of the Temple, but from the time of the 
 decree for the rebuilding of the Wall, through which Je- 
 rusalem became once more a capital, and the Jews a 
 nation, the "seven and three score and- two weeks" of 
 the Great Prophecy measured to " the Messiah, the 
 Prince.^ " In that prophecy it was revealed to Daniel 
 that the Wall should be rebuilt, " even in troublous 
 times," and it was rebuilt in times that were so, not only 
 for the Jews, but for Persia as well. For the decree, 
 that Jerusalem should be a City, seems to have grow^n 
 out of the facts that the Persians had not only lost, as 
 subjects, all the Greek sailors of tlie coast of Asia Minor 
 and the adjacent islands, but had agreed not to come 
 within three days' journey of the sea; and, therefore, 
 strong reasons of state policy dictated their permission 
 to fortify their almost impregnable, inland site of Jeru- 
 salem. Until these disasters, the state policy of Persia 
 
 \Neh. iv. 18,21. 2 Dau. ix. 25. 
 
DANIEL AND THE IHAGI. 121 
 
 was rather regardless of the Jews, as a people of small 
 account, if not distrustful of them. It was not until, 
 in a measure, compelled by circumstances, that they 
 were willing to trust them with power, and to assent to 
 their having a Capital of their own — a trust of which 
 the Jews proved themselves worthy. The two edicts 
 — the one for the building of the Temple, the other for 
 the building of the Wall of Jerusalem — are often con- 
 fused together ; but they were separated by the time of 
 more than half a century ; the latter grew out of politi- 
 cal changes that were subsequent to the former, and 
 was dictated by military considerations ; while there 
 seems to have been no military, and no political, reason 
 of much w^eight, that could have moved to the other. 
 
 It may, perhaps, be surmised that the former decree 
 may have been a boon, purchased from Cyrus with a 
 bribe — to which Asiatic kings have usually been acces- 
 sible ; but, apart from the sublime terms of the decree 
 itself, such an idea fits onlv the late deo'enerate stao^es 
 of the Persian Empire, and does not accord with the 
 hardihood and temperance of its uncorrupt youth, nor 
 with aught known of its heroic founder. 
 
 His religion bore some resemblance to the Hebrew ; 
 but this alone would not have made a king, who wor- 
 shipped Ormazd in the temple of the firmament, and 
 whose altars were the " earth o'er gazing mountains " 
 of Iran, build for Jehovah a house in far Judea, 
 w^hen such a purpose was likely to provoke the scorn, and 
 to kindle against him the religious zeal of those Persians, 
 who destroyed temples of the Greeks and the gods of 
 Egypt. 
 
122 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 For the remarkable decree of Cyrus, then, there must 
 have been a cause as remarkable. From the terms of 
 the decree itself it appears that this was a command of 
 God, — undoubtedly that revealed, before Cyrus was 
 born, to the Hebrew prophet, Isaiah. It was, then, 
 divinely ordained and divinely foretold ; but the super- 
 natural, as revealed, is ever so harmoniously blended 
 with the natural, in a course of events where the two 
 are seen together, that the better the natural, in such a 
 case, is understood, the more the supernatural is credi- 
 ble. Besides the fact of this revelation, the decree 
 seems to require for its explanation the presence, at 
 the Persian court, of some Hebrew, familiar with 
 palaces and clothed in power. For, between this com^ 
 mand, hidden in a foreign language and in the books of 
 slaves, and its fulfilment by the King, there is a gulf, 
 which even the imagination can hardly bridge over. 
 That gulf is bridged over by the preternatural history 
 of a man made for the time, by the fact that there 
 was near that Persian monarch a Hebrew, accredited by 
 miracles and strong in wisdom, honored alike by the 
 Chaldeans, Nebuchadnezzar and Belshazzar, and by 
 Darius the Mede, Daniel the prophet and the sage, that 
 imperial man, himself the harmony of many diversities, 
 whose strange, unique history, even to the Assyrian 
 coloring and Babylonian grandeur of his visions, is so 
 consistent with itself, and with the world-wide changes 
 and wonders among which he lived. 
 
 It is not written in the Scriptures that Daniel had 
 aught to do with the decree of Cyrus ; but there is no 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 123 
 
 full history, either of the decree, or of Daniel. We 
 know him well. After Moses, he is the grandest and 
 the most life-like man in the Hebrew annals, — which 
 is to say, in the annals of mankind ; yet we have only 
 his visions framed in a slight sketch of his life. As 
 would be natural to an aged man, a chapter is given to 
 his youth ; and this is so masterly, so luminous a piece of 
 self-portraiture, that it supplies all that is needed of his 
 biography, and of the times and circumstances in which 
 he lived, when it is supplemented by the few facts he 
 afterwards relates of himself, and by the brief historical 
 references interspersed among those visions and revela- 
 tions, to preserve which, is the aim of this memoir. All 
 that is written by him is written to the glory of God, 
 and not of himself. It is for this he records his own 
 safety in the den of lions ; for he also records, so na- 
 turally, how the three companions of his boyhood were 
 safe in the furnace of fire. All this unique memoir — 
 if such it may be called — with the exception of its 
 opening page, recites open interventions of God, with 
 interpretations of them, or visions to him revealed; and 
 it is not altogether within its scope to relate the part he 
 may have had in obtaining the decree of Cyrus. Yet 
 there may be an allusion to it ; and, if there is so, 
 though very slight, it is characteristic of the heart 
 of the man. The first chapter, which seems to him suf- 
 ficiently to introduce those events in his life that he 
 feels he must put on record forever, ends with saying, — 
 " this Daniel continued till the first year of Cyrus the 
 Persian." This seems to me lihe the pointing of his 
 
124 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 hand to some event in that year; for, one of the reve- 
 lations to him is dated in that king's third year ; and, 
 ^gain, at the close of the chapter describing his deliver- 
 ance from the lions, it is added, "this Daniel prospered 
 in the reign of Darius and of Cyrus the Persian." 
 Now, it was in that first year of his reign that Cyrus 
 sent forth his decree to rebuild the Temple. 
 
 Whether this be, or not, the meaning of his pointing 
 thus to that ever memorable year, I cannot but think 
 that one of the latest, one of the noblest and most 
 characteristic of all his achievements, was his gaining 
 from Cyrus this grand decree. For here the known of 
 the history of Daniel points straight to the unknown. 
 He seems born for this ; and there was no Hebrew, who 
 would have dared, or been suiFered by his people, to 
 take his place in this matter, or, to whom, in his stead, 
 the King would have listened, as an interpreter of 
 Hebrew prophecy. The presence, then, of Daniel with 
 Cyrus, no doubt, is the missing link between the pro- 
 phecy and its fulfilment ; and thus the decree itself, 
 without him almost incredible, is one of the facts in the 
 history of the time, that confirms the history of the 
 prophet. 
 
 Vainly the Genius of Painting tries to shadow forth 
 the mystery of the last night of Babylon. When Bel- 
 shazzar feasted high his thousand lords, and they drank 
 their wine from the vessels of the Temple of God, and 
 j)raiscd their images of gold and of stone, and the 
 finjjers of a man's hand came forth and wrote on the 
 wall, how well it suits the spiritual meaning of the sign. 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 125 
 
 that none but a Hebrew can read the wrltins: I How 
 well the ordering of invisible powers is known, when the 
 last word of Babylon does honor to a Hebrew ! The his- 
 tory of the world is a drama performed in the presence 
 of invisible spectators ; and the actors do not understand 
 what they are representing. Belshazzar, proclaiming 
 the prophet third ruler in his realm, shows, in the last of 
 its kings, the high spirit of the founders of his empire ; 
 yet in that hour the greatness of Daniel dwarfs the 
 pillared glories of his capital, and overmatches all the 
 gods and all the men of Babylon ; while the whole scene 
 is the everlasting symbol of the world's glory and the 
 world's ruin. 
 
 But, in moral grandeur, it equals not that left untold, 
 when, in the palace-temple of the Great King, in the 
 presence of his officers of state, who, in number and 
 rank, made his court seem to Persia a semblance of the 
 court on high, and to God's representative on earth, 
 Daniel interpreted the command of the Almighty, say- 
 ing to the Conqueror, by name, "I the Lord, who will 
 go before thee to open the gates of brass, to break in 
 pieces the bars of iron, to subdue the nations before thee, 
 1 charge thee to rebuild my house in Jerusalem ; " and 
 when the Master of the World believed the word of the 
 Lord, and, with the assent of the religious powers of 
 his realm, sent forth that decree, on which, to human 
 eyes, hung all the future the Prophet saw in vision. 
 
 The grand modesty of his silence seems to me rather 
 to prove, than to disprove, that the chief actor in that 
 surpassing hour was Daniel. But, whether so or not, 
 
126 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 that decree is of deepest interest to our inquiries. As the 
 Persian kings were Pontiffs, the proclamation of Cyrus, 
 the Persian, ^'the Lord God of Heaven hath given me 
 all the kingdoms of the earth, and He hath charged me 
 to build for Him a house in Jerusalem ; " and the pre- 
 vious proclamation of the Median, Darius, " unto all 
 people, nations, and languages, I make a decree, that, 
 in every dominion of my kingdom, men fear and tremble 
 before the God of Daniel, for He is the living God," 
 were authoritative recognitions of Jehovah, as the same 
 with Ormazd, the God of the Persians ; and, as Cyrus, 
 no doubt, consulted the Chief Magi before he made his 
 decree, at least this great historical fact inevitably fol- 
 lows, that part of Hebrew Scripture was interpreted 
 to them^ and, by them, most solemnly acknowledged 
 and acted upon as divine. 
 
 Even if the reverence of the Magi for the command 
 of Jehovah concerning his Temple in Jerusalem was not 
 owing to Daniel, it would still be true that the imagina- 
 tion can hardly frame a course of events that would have 
 given a stranger, greater influence with the Magi, 
 than that recorded of him. In the East, royal favor 
 makes dignitaries with a swiftness and completeness so 
 impressive to Orientals, that they conceive it hath in it 
 a divine quality, and listen, as to God, when commanded 
 to bow down before the slave, or the stranger, whom 
 kings delight to honor. Familiar with the sudden ruin 
 of favorites, the honor of Daniel, continuing through 
 changes of dynasties and a succession of rulers, must 
 have greatly impressed the Magi, and, together with the 
 
DANIEL AXD THE il^lGI. 127 
 
 natural and supernatural wisdom to which it was due, 
 must have oriven him a o^rand entrance into their reii- 
 giously sensitive minds. His previsio^n of the kingdom 
 of the Lord was so much in harmony with the great hope 
 of their religion, of the triumph of the kingdom of Light, 
 that it is in vain to look to anv other ancient religion for 
 a similar point of contact between it and the sublime 
 visions of Hebrew Prophecy; and even more so, for 
 such another, as the Persian expectation of a Redeemer 
 to come, in the likeness of man. 
 
 But the explanations and confirmations of the Pil- 
 grimage of the "Wise Men are not thus exhausted, for 
 from the Scriptures it seems to appear, how through 
 the working together of Hebrew truths, and of their 
 own ideas, the ^lagi connected the birth of a predicted 
 Redeemer, and an appearing Star. The Evangelist 
 records a part only of the fiicts, but in the Bible voice 
 answers unto voice. 
 
 Daniel, one of the children, '* understanding science, 
 having ability to stand in the King's palace, and to 
 whom misht be taui^ht the learninor and the tonizue of 
 the Chaldeans," was familiar with the religions of those 
 nations among whom his lot was cast. His training 
 makes this certain ; and without this knowledge, he 
 would not have been called to the offices he held. Such, 
 too, the spirit of the man, and such the circumstances 
 in which he was placed, that he must have felt intense 
 interest in prophecies of the Messiah, not of a Hebrew 
 origin ; and must have made use of such to enkindle, 
 among the Wise of the East, an expectation of the 
 
128 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 Messiah. With what is known of his history, there is 
 needed no further evidence that these things were so. 
 
 The oracle of Balaam was such a prophecy — and he 
 must have made this use of it, not only for the general 
 reason that it was not a Hebrew prophecy, but for the 
 particular reason that Balaam was of Mesopotamia. 
 This was a more interesting fact to Chaldeans than to 
 Magians ; but in their relations with Daniel, the learned 
 in Babylon were one class ; and the fame of Balaam 
 was great enough to transcend national lines. If his 
 fame did not, the remoteness of his age would ; for he 
 lived in a time, that, in the reign of Cyrus, was hoary 
 antiquity. His voice then reached the Magi from the 
 height of a thousand years. Of personages like Ba- 
 laam, the tradition lives on ; age repeats it to listening 
 youth, by them to be repeated in their age, and even 
 the far-off echo retains something of the power of the 
 voice. In Chaldea, there may have been oracles of Ba- 
 laam preserved in writing ; but whether or not preserved 
 in writing, or by tradition, Daniel could point to one 
 oracle of his in the books of the Hebrews. There it was 
 written, " Balaam, the son of Beor, ... he hath said, 
 which heard the words of God and knew the knowledoe 
 of the Most High, which saw the vision of the Almighty, 
 falling into a trance, but having his eyes open, I shall 
 see Him, but not now; I shall behold Him, but not 
 nigh. There shall come a Star out of Jacob, and 
 a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel." ^ The words, 
 
 ^ Numbers xxiv. 15, IG, 17. 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 129 
 
 ** there shall come a Star out of Jacob," must have 
 struck the imagination of astrologers, — and such the 
 Magi were. With their notions, they could not but 
 think this saying meant that, in some future age, a Star 
 would usher in the dominion of some Great Personage 
 in Judea. This was, naturally, inevitably their inter- 
 pretation of the oracle. And the wonderful purpose 
 of their own Pontiff king, moved to it by the command 
 of God to restore the enslaved and exiled children of 
 Israel to their own country, must have intensified their 
 wonder at this very ancient prophecy of one not of the 
 Hebrew race. This strange thing which they them- 
 selves had witnessed, and in which they themselves had 
 borne a part, must have seemed to them in mysterious 
 harmony with the word of the ancient seer, in presag- 
 in^: somethins: marvellous in the future of Israel. 
 
 Data, from which the time of the Messiah might be 
 computed, were revealed to Daniel. There is reason to 
 think the Magi knew this, for Plebrew prophecy was 
 no secret thing. The revelations of the prophets were 
 published to their own countrymen, and the books that 
 contained them were not hidden from strangers. It is 
 evidence of this that, before the Christian era, the Jews 
 translated them all into the Greek, then the common 
 language of a great part of the world. If the revela- 
 tion as to the time of the Messiah was in any way 
 made known to the Magi of the reign of Cyrus, 
 whether by Daniel himself or not, their high venera- 
 tion for the prophet, and the religious interest of the 
 oracle, could not but have fixed their attention earnestly 
 9 
 
130 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 upon it. Even the fact that it was mystical in its lan- 
 guage, and difficult of interpretation, appealed to the 
 professional honor of men trained to look into the mean- 
 ing of dark sayings, and versed in the harmonies of 
 numbers ; and they must have tried to search out its true 
 import and determine the time. For the aspiration to 
 pierce into the secrets of the future, then unchilled by 
 disappointments and unsatiated, as now, by the fulness 
 of knowledge revealed, was so eager and intense as to 
 absorb into itself a large part of the activity of the 
 human intellect, hardly less active then, than now. 
 Now, a great earnestnesss to search into the secret 
 things of the worlds in space, has taken the place of 
 the old lon^ino: to search into the secret thino[s of the 
 worlds in time, and the present intensity of the one 
 measures the ancient intensity of the otlier. 
 
 The date the Magi fixed upon as the end of the seven 
 and three score and two weeks of the oracle may have 
 closely approximated to the truth. This date, and the 
 ancient prediction of a Star at the birth of the Great 
 Personage whose time was thus foretold, — a predic- 
 tion in harmony with their modes of thought as astrolo- 
 gers, and, in itself, simple and striking, — these were 
 not likely to be forgotten in the unbroken succession of 
 these conservators of traditions. 
 
 But in reflecting upon the probability of some rela- 
 tion between the revelation of the Lord to Daniel and 
 the pilgrimage of Magi to Jerusalem, seeking for Him, 
 three more or less difficult questions arise. The seven, 
 and the three score and two weeks measure not to the 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 131 
 
 year of the Messiah's birth, but to the fulness of his 
 life : — How then could the Magi have identified the 
 Star of His Birth? The answer to this question in- 
 volves the consideration of certain astronomical facts, 
 and must be deferred to a subsequent chapter. 
 
 The second question is. How could revelations of 
 Daniel to the Magi have been remembered five hundred 
 years and more? This would be a great difficulty if 
 they were entrusted to tradition. Even then their 
 memory might have thus lasted, and could, at any time, 
 have been reinvigorated from the sacred books of the 
 Hebrews, who, from the time of Cyrus onwards, dwelt 
 in considerable numbers in the capitals of the Persians, 
 or of the Parthians. But some revelations to Daniel 
 may have been preserved by the Magi in writing, as all 
 of them were by the Jews through this very period. 
 For the Magi had a literature ; and this was growing 
 for some centuries before the time of Daniel, and, on- 
 wards, to the time of the conquest of Alexander (B. C. 
 331) ; and, after thousands of years, some parts of this 
 are still preserved by yet existing Magi, that is by the 
 priests of the Parsees, who are lineal and spiritual suc- 
 cessors of the Magi of the reign of Cyrus, inheriting 
 their blood, observing the same religious rites, revering 
 the same books, and honoring Zoroaster, 
 
 About the year B. C. 464, Theniistocles, flying from 
 Greece, found, for a time, honor with the Great King. 
 Had the royal archives of Media and Persia survived, 
 po doubt there would be found in them some note of 
 this, and some memoranda as to the policy he advised 
 
132 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 towards the Greeks. At the earnest persuasion of the 
 king himself, the honor of an initiation into the Order 
 of the Magi was conferred on this ilhistrious forei2;ner. 
 Had this unspiritual man been a diviner and seer, might 
 not oracles of his have been remembered by the Magi ? 
 and were their entire literature now extant, might they 
 not reasonably be looked for there? Save that he 
 lived a century earlier, this would be more probable iu 
 the case of Daniel. His supernatural wisdom, his 
 official position as chief of the wise men of Babylon, 
 his eminence above all the learned orders of the Per- 
 sian Empire, make it almost certain that there was 
 some record of him in the books of the Ma^i. 
 
 In the period from the conquest of Alexander, to the 
 reestablishment of the Persian Kingdom (A.D. 226), 
 much the largest part of this JMagian literature perished ; 
 but what part of it was in existence at the Christian era, 
 or what that part contained, is unknown ; and it is quite 
 possible that, in it, there may then have been that reve- 
 lation to Daniel, which was then, as it is now, and ever 
 will be, of world-wide interest. 
 
 The third question is this : As the Persians believed 
 that Sosiosh, whose coming was to bring about the 
 renovation of all things, would be born of the family 
 of Zoroaster, could they have received, as true, a revela- 
 tion that this hio^h honor would be oiven to a land and 
 race that was once subject to them, and which, in the 
 various ways known to national egotism and pride, they 
 thought inferior to their own ? As the difficulty here 
 need not be extended to the whole of the Magi, as it 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 133 
 
 reaches only to those who went to Jerusalem, it might 
 suffice to say, that, in the minds of a few, this might be 
 accounted for by the authority of the prophet Daniel, 
 and by the fact that, in other nations, a few grand souls 
 have risen above the prejudices of their race and time ; 
 but some direct light may be thrown upon tliis diffi- 
 culty. If the Magian pilgrims to Jerusalem sought 
 for the Sosiosh, who, according to the Persian belief, 
 was to put an end to death, to raise the dead, and to 
 make all things new, then it must be supposed that a 
 very great victory was gained by them over their na- 
 tional feelinofs. This would not be incredible to those 
 w^ho believe that God is able to guide to all truth, and 
 to exalt to all nobility ; but in showing the possibility 
 of a Hebrew historical statement regarded strictly as 
 such, the line of thought must be limited to purely his- 
 torical considerations. 
 
 The IMagian belief in the Sosiosh, in its earliest 
 form, seems to have known of one, but in a later form, 
 it held that three Prophets were to arise, of whom the 
 Greatest would be the Last. Now, in the revelation 
 to Daniel, the coming foretold seems not to be of that 
 absolutely final effect, attributed, by the Persians, to the 
 last of the mighty Three. It is not so incredible, then, 
 as irrespective of this it might be, that certain of the 
 Magi believed that one of these mioht be born in the 
 Hebrew land, and of the Hebrew race ; or, their belief 
 may have been wholly distinct from their own Median 
 traditions, save as they prepared them to accredit the 
 oracle of the prophet, as being in harmony with 
 
134 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 their main features. And here the fact should be re- 
 called, that the religion of the Hebrews and of the Magi 
 were not alien religions ; that their Pontiff kings had 
 solemnly acknowledged that the God -of the Hebrews 
 was the same God of heaven whom the Persians v/or- 
 shipped ; and that the Temple in Jerusalem was, in some 
 true sense, a Persian Temple, as its rebuilding was 
 ordered by edicts of Persian kings. In all the earth, 
 the Persians and the Hebrews stood alone in their ad- 
 herence to the primeval revelation of the unity of God, 
 and out of this, in part, there had grown, for a time, 
 close relations between them. Beside this, the Persian 
 was, by nature, generously appreciative. His zeal for 
 the faith made him intolerant of the idolatry of other 
 nations, but he was not narrows-minded as the Jews — 
 quite erroneously — are often said to have been. Thus, 
 a variety of considerations tend to make it credible that, 
 the minds of some of the Magi might have been open 
 to accredit the fact revealed to Daniel, that a great 
 Deliverer would be born of a race, which, though alien 
 from their own in blood, was kindred in worship. 
 
 Even had Daniel not lived, the Magian pilgrimage to 
 Jerusalem might be explained by the public, and long- 
 cherished Jewish expectation of a Messiah, a knowl- 
 edge of which was widely spread abroad. Such an 
 expectation made known to some of the Magi of the 
 Far East, and received by them as accounting for a 
 new phenomenon in the heavens, might, with a few 
 Asiatics who w^ere enthusiasts, astrologers, and members 
 of an order wdiose characteristic it was ever to be watch- 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 135 
 
 ins: for the sis^ns and wonders of the intervention of 
 Ormazd in the affairs of men, might, in that age have 
 led to such a pilgrimage. But the Magian pilgrimage 
 is not so bare as this of known antecedent facts that 
 give to it credibility. It is hardly possible to take what 
 is recorded of Daniel and place it side by side with the 
 Magian pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and not to believe 
 they are related as cause and effect. The explanation 
 of that pilgrimage, thus suggested, — so far as it goes, 
 — is so natural and so perfect, that only the fanati- 
 cism of unbelief will refuse to admit its probability ; 
 and to establish it, requires only a very little direct 
 evidence. 
 
 I find this in the inquiry which the Magi made in 
 Jerusalem. The form of this is remarkable. They 
 inquire for the King of the Jews. This sounds both 
 strange and dangerous. It was strange, for Herod had 
 been king for more than thirty years, and all his chil- 
 dren were grown up ; and all Jerusalem felt it was 
 dangerous, as the Jews had perverted their belief in 
 a Messiah from a spiritual to a political Redeemer. 
 But certainly they were not understood to inquire for 
 a temporal prince by Herod, who, meaning to delude 
 them, promised when they found Him they sought, he 
 himself would worship Him ; and, no doubt, the Magi 
 were understood by all to inquire for a spiritual Lord. 
 No doubt they explained that this was their meaning ; 
 for the words ascribed to them are only a part of what 
 they said, though preserving the main features in their 
 inquiry, and its very remarkable form. 
 
136 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 From whence could have come the very peculiar 
 form of their inquiry ? The words used in the revela- 
 tion to Daniel explain what is else inexplicable. That 
 revelation foretold — "a Messiah, a Prince" — as the 
 words are rendered in the English version. The first 
 -vvord — transferred, unchanged from the Hebrew into 
 the English — means " the anointed." The second 
 means a leader, a ruler, and, as leadership and rule per- 
 tain to those of royal blood, its meaning tends towards 
 the idea of a King. Even if the word be taken in the 
 sense of a leader merely, it is associated with the word 
 anointed, and anointing was part of the ceremony in 
 coronation, and was not even for princes, but for kings, 
 only. On putting the terms together — an anointed 
 chief — then, the idea of a King comes out unmistaka- 
 ble and clear. Translations of the Bible into other 
 tongues keep near as may be to the literal sense, but in 
 a free translation, seeking only to express the thought, 
 the natural rendering here would be, a King ; and it is 
 most likely a Hebrew would have used this term in 
 translating these words to a foreigner, though from 
 motives of prudence, the Jews under Herod preferred to 
 use among themselves the term Messiah, in which the 
 idea of kingship was less dangerously prominent ; and 
 certainly the word King would be the one that would 
 most naturally occur to foreigners, as the best interpre- 
 tation of the fulness of the thought of the prophet. 
 It is clear, then, why the Magi made their inquiry in 
 the form they did, "Where is he that is born the King 
 of the Jews." They thought the term King, as used 
 
DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 137 
 
 by them, would be understood in a spiritual sense ; 
 they thought there was a peculiar propriety in the form 
 of their inquiry, because it showed the motive to their 
 pilgrimage was a prophecy of Daniel, who, though a 
 Hebrew, was a Magian, held in honor by their re- 
 nowned sovereigns of old, and whose bones were in the 
 land of the Medes. This was what the form of their 
 inquiry meant. This the Evangelist meant to indicate 
 by preserving that form. And this would ever have 
 been clear to the readers of the English version had it 
 rendered the words in the prophecy of Daniel, as the 
 ancient Syriac version did render them, " the anointed 
 
 one, THE KING." 
 
 As the fact of the continuing presence of Hebrews 
 in the land of the Medes and Persians is more or less 
 important in the explanation of the Magian pilgrimage, 
 I repeat that, from the time of Cyrus to the conquest 
 of Alexander, Judea was a part of the Persian Em- 
 pire ; that, in the Persian, and subsequently in the 
 Parthian capitals, there were multitudes of Jews ; and 
 that the Star was first seen by the Magi in Baby- 
 lonia, one of the great settlements of the Jews of the 
 Dispersion. A little later than the Christian era, it 
 was the seat of one of the schools of Jewish learning, 
 and in the " days of Herod the King," Hillel, whom for 
 his wisdom and piety, the Rabbins venerate next to 
 Ezra, came up from thence to Jerusalem. From its 
 learning, that country had strong attractions for the 
 Magi, to whom all religious learning was attractive. 
 When they saw the Star, they were sojourning, or 
 
138 DANIEL AND THE MAGI. 
 
 perhaps dwelling in that country. Either would be 
 natural enough, for it was adjacent to Persia. Like 
 Persia it was then under the Parthian rule. There w^as 
 Ctesiphon one of the Parthian capitals ; and, from 
 their reception by King Herod, it is plain they were 
 no strangers to the palaces of kings. 
 
 This fact that the Star was seen by them, not in 
 Persia, but in Babylonia, not in the Far East but in 
 the East, may go some ways tow^ards explaining their 
 Pilgrimage, as shown in the next chapter. 
 
HOPE OF THE MESSIAH. 139 
 
 CHAPTER VII. 
 
 HOPE OF THE MESSIAH IN SYRIA AND THE EAST. 
 
 When the Magi from distant Bactria, or Parthia, 
 or Persia Proper, or any other district of the Far East, 
 came into the East, they had accomplished one geo- 
 graphical stage of their long journey to Jerusalem, 
 though they knew it not ; and they had accomplished 
 one historical stage of it also, for they had come fully 
 within the circle of a wide-spread expectation, at that 
 very time, of the Birth of some great personage in Judea. 
 
 This expectation is witnessed to by one Hebrew and 
 by two Latin writers, — all in whose writings we should 
 expect to find it, — though their testimony is by no 
 means all the evidence of the fact. Josephus, writing 
 of the Fall of Jerusalem, says, "What cliiefly incited 
 the Jews to the war, was an ambiguous prophecy, found 
 in their sacred writings, that about that time, one from 
 their country should obtain the Empire of the World. 
 . . . This oracle in reality denoted the elevation of 
 Vespasian, he having been proclaimed Emperor in 
 Judea." ^ Tacitus, having chronicled the signs and 
 wonders foretokening the foil of the city, says, " Quae 
 
 1 Bel. Jud. vi. 5, 4. 
 
140 HOPE OF THE MESSIAH 
 
 pauci in metum trahebant ; pluribus persuasio inerat, an- 
 tiqiiis sacerdotum Uteris contineri, eo ipso tempore fore 
 ut valesceret Orieiis profectique Judaja rerum potirentur ; 
 qua; ambages Yespasianum ac Titum pra^dixerat. Sed 
 vulgus, more humanoe cupidinis, sibi tantam fatoruna 
 magnitudinem interpretati, ne adversis quidem ad verum 
 mutabantur : " ^ — Because of these the few feared, but 
 the many believed that it was written in the ancient 
 books of the priests, that at that very time the Orient 
 — i. e. Syria — should prevail ; and that those going 
 forth out of Judea should obtain the Empire of the 
 World. These ambiguous oracles predicted Vespasian 
 and Titus. But the peoj^le, as is the way with men led 
 by their wishes, interpreted in their own behalf this 
 destined greatness, and were not converted to the truth 
 even by calamities. 
 
 Suetonius says, " Percrebuerat Oriente toto vetus 
 et constans opinio, esse in fjitis, ut eo tempore Judaea 
 profecti rerum potirentur. Id de Imperatore Romano, 
 quantum eventu postea paruit, predictum Judtei ad se tra- 
 hentes rebellarunt : " ^ — An ancient and abidinnf belief 
 greatly prevailed throughout all the Orient, that fate had 
 decreed, that at that very time those going forth out of 
 Judea should obtain the empire of the world. This pre- 
 diction of the Roman Emperor, as afterwards appeared 
 by the event, the Jews, taking to themselves, rebelled. 
 
 The concurrence of an ancient, wide-spread presenti- 
 ment springing out of the oracles of the Jews, with the 
 
 ^ Tac, Hist., V. 13. ^ Suet., Vita Vespas., iv. 
 
IN SYKIA AND THE EAST. 141 
 
 appearing of one who answered to it, yet in a way- 
 bey ond all the imaginings of men, is a fact equally 
 hard for infidels to explain or to deny. In this dilemma, 
 they try to weaken the evidence for a fact whose im- 
 portance they cannot hide, and claim that the testimony 
 of the two Romans must be ruled out because they 
 copied Josephus. Some Christian critics, conceding this 
 claim, countenance the assumption concealed in it, that 
 the fact rests on the word of Josephus only. This 
 assumption is an error, and the evidence of this ex- 
 pectation is so vital to our argument, and in many ways 
 is so important, that it should here be stated. 
 
 Without the testimony of any historian, the prophe- 
 cies, beginning with Genesis, and especially those in the 
 book of Daniel, are such that there must have been in 
 Palestine, early in the first century, a lively hope of the 
 appearing of some great personage. That such an ex- 
 pectation did, then and there, prevail, if not stated 
 expressly in the Gospels, is inwrought with the whole 
 course of the events they describe. The wars of the 
 Jews with the Romans at the time of the fall of Jerusa- 
 lem, and under Hadrian, accord in general features and 
 in particular facts with such an expectation. And there 
 is the testimony of Josephus. Such is the general 
 evidence of this expectation apart from the two Roman 
 writers. Josephus wrote his history, in part, to screen 
 his unhappy countrymen from the jealousy of the Ro- 
 mans ; and, Hebrew at heart, though an apostate, he 
 would not have named it at all, had it not been too well 
 known for him to pass it over. The fact was of such a 
 
142 HOPE OF THE MESSIAH 
 
 kind that it must have been well known to the Romans. 
 The prophecies of the Jews had long been accessible to 
 them in a Greek translation, and were, probably, better 
 known to Roman statesmen and soldiers than to Roman 
 scholars. For Palestine had long been held by Roman 
 garrisons ; and the sagacious officers of Rome, with 
 whom the art of governing subject races was almost in- 
 stinctive, and who were trained in the school of experi- 
 ence to know the power of religious ideas and predictions 
 in war, would have been quick to mark such a belief, 
 and to foresee all that might, and that did, result from 
 it. The bloody siege of Jerusalem, connected as it was 
 with the assumption of the purple by the Flavian dy- 
 nasty, fastened on itself the steady gaze of Rome. The 
 fall of Jerusalem was to the Romans a signal, perchance 
 even a solemn event ; and all the peculiar elements of 
 its destiny must have been carefully noted by those 
 watchful observers of political events. 
 
 There is, then, no antecedent likelihood in the notion, 
 that both Tacitus and Suetonius knew of the expectation 
 of the Jews only from Josephus. They had other au- 
 thority than his for the Jewish w^ar ; and this fact was 
 as likely as any, and more likely than most, to have 
 come to them from other sources. They had read Jo- 
 sephus, no doubt ; it is quite certain that Tacitus had ; 
 and yet it is clear that their statements are independent 
 of his. They enlarge both the prophecy and the expec- 
 tation. Tacitus says the oracle was that Syria should 
 wax mighty ; Suetonius makes all Syria expectant ; 
 while Josephus limits everything to Judea, both pro- 
 
IN SYRIA AND THE EAST. 143 
 
 phecy and expectation. All three describe it as com- 
 mon, but the Latins in a wider field ; and their terms, 
 describing how generally it was talked about, are 
 stronger than the Jew cared to use. 
 
 As to the breadth of this expectation, the Latin 
 writers give the true impression. The Orientals are 
 quick to receive such impressions to a degree a Euro- 
 pean, in this age, can hardly comprehend. It could not 
 have been the expectation of the Jews in Palestine, and 
 not of the Jews in all Syria. Through Syrian Jews 
 it must have pervaded the whole Syrian mind ; and the 
 Syrian Jews being in constant intercourse with their 
 kinsmen " beyond the Euphrates," it must have pervaded 
 the Hebrew mind in that region also. 
 
 Some writers, hesitating between their dislike to ad- 
 mit the fact and a sense of what is due to their critical 
 honor, admit the Latin testimony ; but try to weaken 
 its force, by saying that such an expectation, at the 
 time of the Fall of Jerusalem, does not prove its exist- 
 ence at the Nativity, seventy years before. The gospels 
 prove its existence then ; but, limiting the argument to 
 the Latin evidence, it is enough to say, that a belief, 
 spread throughout all Syria, presupposes a growth and 
 development ; and the words of Suetonius are, " in Syria 
 it was an ancient, abiding belief." 
 
 It was the expectation of the few, before it was of 
 the many. It was known to the more spiritual in Israel 
 — the wisest and quickest to discern the truth revealed 
 as to the time of the Lord's appearing, as well as its 
 mysterious spiritual import ; and then in grosser forms 
 
144 HOPE OF THE MESSIAH. 
 
 it became, at length, the common expectation of the 
 Jews. 
 
 Every stage of this belief was reflected in the great 
 Jewish settlement " beyond the Euphrates." When the 
 priests determined in Jerusalem the instant of the new 
 moon, whose rising fixed the time of the sacred feasts, 
 beacons blazed from height to height along the Syrian 
 highlands, north and eastward, until they gave the sig- 
 nal to the expectant millions of the Dispersion beyond 
 the Great River ; and, with almost equal celerity, every 
 thought and feeling of the Holy City was transmitted to 
 the Hebrews beyond the Euphrates. 
 
 At the time of the Incarnation of our Lord, an elect 
 few in Jerusalem were awaiting his coming ; and there 
 must have been a like expectation among some of their 
 spiritual brethren beyond the Euphrates. When the 
 Magi came from the Far East into the East, they came 
 fully within the circle of this expectance, whether then 
 as general as afterwards or not. Being men of spirit- 
 ual desires, and guided by divine grace, the thought is 
 irresistible, that their ancient belief there received new 
 life ; that, in the very land of the Seer, they heard from 
 Hebrews, as their fathers from a Hebrew, of the Star — 
 by them faithfully remembered — of the King of the 
 Jews ; and not, as their fathers heard, of a Star which 
 was to gild the heavens of a future age, but as then 
 about to shine. If, at such at a time, these astron- 
 omers beheld what science tells us has sometimes been, 
 the outshining of a new Star, we have, at once, the 
 immediate moving cause of their Pilgrimage. 
 
Kepler's discovery. 145 
 
 CHAPTER VIII. 
 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 Christianity is often said to be a system of truths ; 
 but even its most mysterious truths are facts. Chris- 
 tianity, then, is a system of facts; and the evidence for 
 it, the evidence that proves facts. The vv^ eight of such 
 evidence, unlike that which proves mathematical prob- 
 lems, varies in different minds, and it varies in different 
 ages. Questions, touching the validity of this evidence, 
 mithought of by one generation, perplex another; and, 
 v^^hile inquiry is thus constantly stimulated in this ever- 
 varying field, God ever grants fresh confirmations of the 
 reality of Christianity to meet the varying phases of 
 the human mind. 
 
 Kepler, the most illustrious of astronomers, observed 
 a new star, in the constellation Serpentarius, on the 
 night of the 17th of October, in the year of our Lord 
 1604. His master, Tycho Brahe, had observed a sim- 
 ilar wonder in the constellation Cassiopeia, on the night 
 of the 11th of October, in the year 1572. These were 
 not luminous bodies within our atmosphere ; were not 
 within, or near, the solar system ; they were in the region 
 of the fixed stars. Each grew more and more brilliant, 
 till it shone like a planet. Then its lustre waned until 
 10 
 
146 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 it ceased to be visible, — the one in March, 1574, the 
 other in February, 1606. Their light was white, then 
 yellow, then red, then dull, and so went out. 
 
 The star of 1572 appeared in a solitary quarter of the 
 heavens ; the star of 1604 took its stand near the path 
 of the sun, as if, said Kepler, it would receive the salu- 
 tations of all the planets.^ It shone out in a wonderful 
 astrological year.^ In the December before, all astron- 
 omers had been greatly excited by a conjunction of the 
 planets Jupiter and Saturn, that is, their drawing so 
 near together as to form a rare fact in Astronomy, a 
 notable sign in Astrology, — then not wholly fallen into 
 disrepute. In March, 1604, there was a still greater 
 astrological wonder. These two planets were again in 
 conjunction, together wdth the planet Mars. To the 
 astronomers of that time, in whose thoughts there was 
 
 ^ Ilia enim extra limites Zodiaci fulsit, in sidere Cassio- 
 peia, loco cceli infreqiienti, nee iillis planetarum accessiouibns 
 nobilitato ; hsec stationera sibi elegit proxime viam rejj^iam 
 solis, lunte, ceterorumque planetarum ; sic ut ab omuibiis 
 planetis saluteretur. That star (of 1572) shone without the 
 bounds of the Zodiac, in the constellation Cassiopeia, an un- 
 frequented place in the heavens, not ennobled by the ap- 
 proach of any of the planets ; this star (of 1604) chose for 
 itself a place near the royal way of the sun, the moon, and 
 the planets ; as if it would receive the salutations of the 
 planets. — Kepler, De Stella Nova. 
 
 ^ The year, says Sir David Brewster, " of the fiery trigon, 
 or that in which Saturn, Jupiter, and Mars are in the fiery 
 signs, Aries, Leo, and Sagittarius, an event which occurs 
 only every eight hundred years. — Life of Kepler, ch. i. 
 This is especially noted by Kepler. 
 
Kepler's discovery. 147 
 
 much of astrological speculation, these repeated and 
 accumulative portents seemed a forewarning that some- 
 thing wonderful was about to come to pass in the celes- 
 tial or terrestrial spaces. This seemed to them fulfilled, 
 when, in the autumn of that year, in the very quarter of 
 the heavens where two of these planets were still to- 
 gether, this strange star, as Kepler said, — vero vulgo 
 expectata a longo tempore cum multa solemnitate et 
 triumphali pompa ad diem constitutum est ingressa ; 
 more pr^potentis alicujus monarchise, qui metropolim 
 regni invisurus, prsemissis longe antea metatoribus, 
 loca comitatui designat, — far, and wide, and long ex- 
 pected, with much of preparation, and in triumphal 
 pomp, came on the day ordained, like some all-powerful 
 monarch, who, being about to look upon the metropolis 
 of his realm, through officers sent long before, designates 
 to his court their places. 
 
 The analogical genius of Kepler, ever watching for 
 celestial resemblances, through whose intimations he 
 might divine the laws established in the heavens, was 
 es[)ecially excited by the coincidence between the going 
 before of these planetary signs, and the apparition of the 
 star; and he conceived that the Star, seen by the Magi, 
 might have been foretokened and marshalled in by the 
 same train of phenomena he had observed in these 
 
 ^ Iq eum prascise coeli locum, ad quern omnium a^trolo- 
 gorura oculi congressum Jovis et Martis expectantes diri- 
 gebantur. Just in that part of the sky to which the eyes of 
 all astrologers were turned, watching the conjunction of Ju- 
 piter and Mars. — Kepler, De Stella Nova. 
 
148 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 three planets. He, therefore, traced their orbits back- 
 wards for sixteen hundred years, and made the remark- 
 able discovery, that the planets Jupiter and Saturn were 
 in conjunction in the Year of Rome 747, and, again, 
 together with Mars, in 748. The Time of our Lord's 
 Birth can hardly have been earlier. Its true date may 
 be one, and probably is the last, of these years.^ 
 
 Kepler thought his discovery determined the Year of 
 our Lord. It comes not within my plan to consider this 
 opinion ; and, lest the mention of this strangely interest- 
 ing discovery should awaken expectation but to dis- 
 appoint it, I will here say, that I shall not use it as 
 direct or positive evidence of a new Star at the Nativity ; 
 but shall, by and by, try to show that it makes the pil- 
 grimage of the Magi more intelligible. 
 
 For two hundred years, this discovery, made by the 
 Prince of Astronomers, was little heeded. In this cen- 
 tury, it has been more thought of; ^ but there seems, as 
 yet, to be no general acquiescence in any opinion as to 
 its bearing on the first verse of the second chapter of 
 St. Matthew. 
 
 One theory, however, has grown out of it that should 
 here be considered. This theory looks solely to the 
 
 ^ The Christian Era is coincident with 754 ; but from an 
 eclipse in the Year of Herod's death, it is known that he 
 died early in 750. 
 
 ^ In 1827, attention to it was reawakened by Bishop 
 Munter of Copenhagen. It was discussed by the astrono- 
 mer Schubert, of St. Petersburg, and by Dr. Ideler, of 
 Berlin. 
 
Kepler's discovery. 149 
 
 • 
 
 celestial phenomena of the year of Rome 747. Al- 
 ford's admirably clear presentment of it is in these words : 
 " In the year of Rome 747, on the 29th of May, there 
 was a conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, in the twentieth 
 degree of the constellation Pisces, close to the first point 
 of Aries, which was the part of the heavens noted, in 
 astrological science, as that in which the signs denoted 
 the greatest and noblest events. On the 29th of Sep- 
 tember, in the same year, another conjunction of the 
 same planets took place, in the sixteenth degree of 
 Pisces ; and, on the 5th of December, a third, in the 
 fifteenth degree of the same sign. On these two last oc- 
 casions, the two planets were so near, that an ordinary 
 eye would regard them as one star of surpassing 
 brightness.^ Supposing the Magi to have seen the 
 first of these conjunctions, they saw it actually /in the 
 East ; ' for, on the 29th of May, it would rise three 
 and a half hours before sunrise. If they then took their 
 journey, and arrived at Jerusalem in a little more than 
 five months (the journey from Babylon took Ezra four 
 months ; see Ezra vii. 9) ; if they performed the route 
 from Jerusalem to Bethlehem in the evening, as is 
 implied, — the December conjunction, in the fifteenth 
 degree of Pisces, would be before them in the direction 
 of Bethlehem. . . . Abarbanel, the Jew, who knew 
 
 ^ This sentence, from the first edition of Alford's Commen- 
 tary on the New Testament, is omitted in its subsequent 
 editions. I retain it, that the recent inquiries on this sub- 
 ject may be more fully appreciated, as will appear as we 
 proceed. 
 
150 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 nothing of this conjunction, relates it as a tradition, that 
 no conjunction could be of mightier import than that 
 of Jupiter and Saturn, which planets were in conjunc- 
 tion, A. M. 2365, before the birth of Moses, in the 
 sign of Pisces ; and thence remarks, that that sign was 
 the most significant one for the Jews. From this con- 
 sideration he concludes, that the conjunction of these 
 planets, in that sign, in his own time (A. D. 1463), be- 
 tokened the near approach of the Messiah. And, as the 
 Jews did not invent Astrology, but learnt it from the 
 Chaldeans, this idea, that a conjunction in Pisces be- 
 tokened some great event in Judea, must have prevailed 
 amonof the Chaldean astrolos^ers." 
 
 Alford thinks, that, the word Star being taken in 
 what he calls " its wider astrolos^ical meaninof-," " these 
 circumstances form a remarkable coincidence with the 
 history " in St. Matthew ; and that " the very slight 
 apparent inconsistencies with the above explanation are 
 no more than the report of the Magi themselves, and 
 the general belief of the age, would render unavoidable." 
 
 A friend,^ who read this book in manuscript, sug- 
 gested, "that the Magi, taking the time-data furnished 
 by the prophet Daniel, ascertained the year of the Na- 
 tivity, and, erecting a horoscope, predetermined the 
 positions of the planets in the fated year ; that the plan- 
 etary sign, thus foreknown to the Wise Men of the 
 East, received among them the name of the Star of the 
 King of the Jews ; that this prediction, at once religious 
 
 ^ The late Rev. J. McCarty, Rector of Christ's Church, 
 Cincinnati. 
 
keplek's discovery. 151 
 
 and scientific, and so of peculiar interest to them, was 
 treasured up among the wisdom kept from common eyes, 
 and, where it was verified by the result, the pilgrimage 
 is explained." Long previous to the time of Cyrus, the 
 Chaldeans had calculated eclipses ; ^ but whether there 
 could have been, with any of the Magi, the science re- 
 quisite to form such a calculation as this, is very doubt- 
 ful. Still, there may have been, in the unknown of the 
 history of the Magi, the fact supposed ; and this bril- 
 liant suggestion has, at least, this value : it shows that 
 the pilgrimage of the Magi might at once be explained, 
 were our general knowledge of all that is related to it 
 more perfect. It makes the theory advocated by Alford 
 more complete ; but, against each, there are these de- 
 cisive objections. 
 
 In the second chapter of St. Matthew, the word Star 
 cannot mean a conjunction of planets. Had the Magi, 
 alone, used the word, it is conceivable that it might have 
 this meaning. It was so easy for them to have used 
 some more fitting word or phrase, and the jargon of 
 Astrology so clove to adepts in the art, and was so com- 
 mon, that this is not likely ; still, it is possible, and, in 
 the Magi, it was admissible. But the Evangelist makes 
 the word his own ; and such a use of it, though proper 
 for them, was not so for him. 
 
 For the language of Scripture, on natural subjects, 
 has absolute truth. The common idea, that it is less 
 accurate than scientific language, comes from not distin- 
 
 ^ See note on p. 111. 
 
152 
 
 guishiug between two kinds of language. The language 
 of the Scriptures on natural subjects is the language of 
 the human family. Its aim is to describe natural phenom- 
 ena, as they appear. The aim of scientific language is to 
 express facts lying back of the appearance, and to ap- 
 proximate, more and more, to the ultimate cause. Tested 
 by their aims, the common language is perfect, the scien- 
 tific imperfect. The one is perfect at once, the other 
 never. The one is ever the same, the other is ever chang- 
 ing. Scripture reveals scientific truths, but never uses sci- 
 entific language ; if so, it would commit itself to variable 
 ideas. While stating truths in nature, to which, of itself, 
 science could never attain, it still adheres to that com- 
 mon language, that is the same for all, and changes not.^ 
 It thus pictures the genesis of the earth and all that it 
 inhabit. Science may translate what it thus reveals into 
 scientific language, but Scripture describes the events in 
 the beginning, as they would have appeared to the senses. 
 Hence, Scripture would not set forth a scientific concep- 
 tion in words accommodated to the popular mind. This 
 would be neither scientific, or scriptural, language. The 
 Magi might have done this, not the Evangelist. 
 
 Those who hold that the Star of the Magi was a con- 
 junction of the planets, have to do away with the miracle 
 of its guiding. This it is not possible to do. The words 
 are, "Lo, the Star went before them, till it came and 
 stood over where the Younsr Child was." The wordins: 
 
 ^ See " The Six Days of Creation," by Dr. Taylor Lewis, 
 ch. iii., on Phenomenal Lan^jua^je. 
 
KEPLEll's DISCOVERY. 153 
 
 of a legal document is not more precise ; nor can any one, 
 by taking time and pains, frame any form of words, that 
 would better express the Star's guiding. 
 
 The bold, ingenious theory, that what the Magi saw 
 was but a conjunction of certain planets, being, then, 
 contrary to Scripture, might here be dismissed ; yet, 
 the whole history of Kepler's discovery, and of the dis- 
 cussions that have arisen out of it, is so interesting a 
 chapter, both of scientific and religious inquiry, that I 
 give the results arrived at, in a recent investigation, by 
 E.ev. Charles Pritchard, Hon. Secretary of the Royal 
 Astronomical Society,^ made with the intent of testing 
 the theory just considered. This confirms the fact, that 
 there were three conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn in 
 the year of Rome 747. " Similar results also have been 
 obtained by Encke, and the December conjunction has 
 been verified by the Astronomer Royal. ^ No celestial 
 phenomena, therefore, of ancient date, are so certainly 
 ascertained, as the conjunctions in question." But "the 
 planets, instead of seeming like one star, were, at no 
 time, nearer than the very considerable distance of 
 double the moon's apparent diameter."^ He pictures, 
 
 1 Smith's Diet, of the Bible, Art., Star of the Wise Men. 
 
 ^ He also refers to Dr. Ideler's calculation, as " worked 
 out with great care and no very great inaccuracy." This 
 gave the same year and the followiag days : May 20, October 
 27, November 12. His are May 29, September 27, Decem- 
 ber 5. In his later editions, Alford gives both, but seems 
 to accredit the latter. 
 
 ^ As mentioned before, in his first edition, Alford, misled, 
 apparently, by some exaggeration or error of Dr. Ideler's, 
 
154 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 clearly, the celestial phenomena of that year, — "a date 
 assuredly not very distant from the time of our Sa- 
 viour's birth ; " and then tries to determine " how far 
 they fulfil, or fail to fulfil, the conditions required by the 
 narrative in St. Matthew." 
 
 After the conjunction in the month of May, the 
 planets separated slowly " until the end of July, 
 when, their motions becoming retrograde, they again 
 came into conjunction, by the end of September. At 
 that time, there can be no doubt that Jupiter would pre- 
 sent to astronomers a magnificent spectacle. It was then 
 at its most brilliant apparition, for it was at its nearest 
 approach both to the sun and to the earth. Not far 
 from it would be seen its duller and much less conspicu- 
 ous companion, Saturn. This glorious spectacle con- 
 tinued almost unaltered for several days, when the 
 planets again slowly separated, then came to a halt ; 
 when, by reassuming a direct motion, Jupiter again 
 approached to a conjunction, for the third time, with 
 Saturn, just as the Magi may be supposed to have entered 
 the Holy City. And, to complete the fascination of the 
 tale, about an hour and a half after sunset, the two 
 planets might be seen from Jerusalem, hanging, as it 
 were, in the meridian, and suspended over Bethlehem in 
 the distance. These celestial phenomena, thus described, 
 
 stated, that the planets seemed one star. This he has cor- 
 rected ; but, adhering to his theory, says, *' Tlie conjunction 
 of the two planets, complete or incomplete, would be that 
 which would bear astrological significance ; not their looking 
 like one star." 
 
Kepler's discovery. 155 
 
 are, it will be seen, beyond the reach of question ; and, 
 at the first impression, they assuredly appear to fulfil 
 the conditions of the Star of the Magi. 
 
 But, even supposing the Magi did undertake the jour- 
 ney, at the time in question, it seems improbable that 
 the conjunction of December can, on any reasonable 
 grounds, be considered as fulfilling the conditions in 
 Matthew ii. 9. The circumstances are as follows : 
 On December 4, the sun set at Jerusalem at 5 P. M. 
 Supposing the Magi to have then commenced their 
 journey to Jerusalem, they would first see Jupiter, and 
 his dull, and somewhat distant, companion, one and a half 
 hour distant from the meridian, in a south-east direction, 
 and decidedly to the east of Bethlehem. By the time 
 they came to Rachael's tomb (see Robinson's Biblical 
 Researches, xi. 56<S), the planets would be due south of 
 them, on the meridian, and no longer over the hill of 
 Bethlehem (see the maps of Vandervelde and of Tobler) ; 
 for that village (see Robinson, as above) bears from 
 Rachael's tomb, South 5° East -\- 8° declension = 
 South, 13° East. The road then takes a turn to the 
 East, and ascends the hill near to its western extremity ; 
 the planets, would, therefore, be now on their right 
 hand, and a little behind them : "the Star," therefore, 
 ceased altogether to go "before them," as a guide. Ar- 
 rived on the hill, and in the village, it became physi- 
 cally impossible for the Star to stand over any house 
 whatever close to them, seeing that it was now visible 
 far away beyond the hill, to the West, and far off in the 
 heavens, at an altitude of o7°« As they advanced, the 
 
156 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 Star would, of necessity, recede ; and under no circum- 
 stances could it be said to stand "over" any house, 
 unless at the distance of miles from the place where they 
 were. . . A star, if vertical, would appear to stand 
 over any house or object to which a spectator might 
 chance to be near; but a star at an altitude of 57°, 
 could appear to stand over no house or object in the 
 immediate neighborhood of the observer. It is scarcely 
 necessary to add, that, if the Magi had left the Jaffa 
 gate before sunset, they would not have seen the planets 
 at the outset ; and if they had left Jerusalem later, 
 " the Star " would have been a more useless scuide than 
 before. Thus, the beautiful phantasm of Kepler and 
 Ideler, which has fascinated so many writers, vanishes 
 before the more perfect dayhght of investigation. 
 
 Grateful for this minute and difficult investigation, I 
 almost distrust its accuracy, from the carelessness of its 
 allusion to Kepler. The phantasy, that the Star of the 
 Magi was a conjunction of planets, may "vanish before 
 the more perfect daylight of investigation," but it never 
 deluded him. The celestial foretokenings — as they 
 seemed to Kepler — in the year 747, he thought of, as 
 continuing into the year 748, and as reaching the cul- 
 mination of their promise only when the three planets 
 met together. To him, that golden circle of auspicious 
 fire was but the herald of the New Star — even as John 
 was but the herald of Christ. It was not that Lisrht, 
 but was sent to bear witness of that LiG:ht. 
 
 Since the New Star was the immediate cause that 
 moved the Magi to undertake their Pilgrimage, the con- 
 
Kepler's discovery. 157 
 
 junctions of the planets, in 747 and 748, may seem to be 
 so disjoined from it, as in no way to aid in explaining 
 it. Not so, however. As history before, so science 
 now, enables us to answer difficult questions that have 
 been pressed against the narrative. Strauss demands. 
 How could the Magi, from a Star, have known the birth 
 of the King of the Jews ? — a thing, he would, perchance, 
 have said credible, only in credulous ages, with deluded 
 votaries of exploded art. Once, it would have sufficed 
 to have said. The Lord may have told them. It would 
 now and ever suffice, were it not that there is no inti- 
 mation of this in their inspired history ; and had it been 
 the fact, the Magi would have been quick to declare, 
 the Evangelist to record it. It is, therefore, to be sup- 
 posed they were led to their conclusion, as men are 
 usually guided to truth, not, indeed, without divine 
 grace, yet, in the course of events. The grace of God 
 is not thus lessened, and the faith of man is exalted. 
 
 A course of preceding events, such as might have led 
 the Wise Men to Jerusalem, may be pointed out, by con- 
 necting together circumstances that are, all of them, 
 either credible or certain. They had faith in ancient tra- 
 ditions. This is the inner key to the secret of their 
 Pilgrimage ; which is explained on the supposition that 
 their own traditions, the belief, at that time, of the near 
 appearing of some Great Person in Judea, their astro- 
 logical notions, and the planetary signs, were the 
 antecedent, related causes of that faith in the significance 
 of the New Star which did send them to Jerusalem. 
 
 The expectant wonder of Kepler, and of all the as- 
 
158 Kepler's discovery. 
 
 trologers of his time, as they watched the planetary 
 signs at the close of the year 1603, and in the following 
 spring, well illustrates the feelings with which we may 
 suppose those ancient astrologers, on the night of the 
 29th of May, in the year of Rome 747, to have wit- 
 nessed, in the cloudless sky of the East, the greeting of 
 the planets Jupiter and Saturn. With mingling feelings 
 of human curiosity and religious wonder, these devout 
 astrologers gaze on this planetary omen, believed by 
 them to be a sio^n for Judea. The thouofht, that this 
 portent might foretell that the birth of its long-expected 
 King was, at least, nigh, takes quick possession of their 
 souls, as they inquire within themselves. What can, 
 what does this mean? What oreat thinGf has come, or is 
 about to come, to pass in the land of Judea ? In the 
 month of September, this marvel renewed, kindles their 
 hearts to yet greater earnestness of inquiring hope. And , 
 when, in December, the mystic sign, for the third time, 
 is repeated, and when, in the following spring, these 
 celestial foretokenings reach the fulness of the perfect 
 number of four, and yet another planet joins in this 
 greeting and language of the spheres, their faith rises 
 near to the height of certainty ; and when, at last, the 
 New Star appears, these unsleeping watchers of the 
 prophesying heavens instantly connect all these con- 
 tinuous signs and wonders in the firmament, and feel, 
 with an assurance to which an audible voice from the 
 skies would have added not, that the Star, so gloriously 
 marshalled by attesting planets to its place on high, is, 
 indeed, the long-predicted Star of tlie King of the Jews, 
 
Kepler's discovery. 159 
 
 and that He is born. The apparition of His Star Is 
 to them what St. Augustine calls it — lingua coeli — 
 a word from heaven. 
 
 An explanation, then, of their Pilgrimage is given ; 
 an explanation that consists of facts. Thus, it is a fact 
 that there was an oracle that, in ancient times, was un- 
 derstood to foretell that the Birth of One, afterwards 
 known as the Messiah, would be announced by a star: 
 it is a fact that this oracle was known to Daniel ; that 
 the Time of the Messiah was revealed to him ; that he 
 had great authority with the Magi ; that his prevision 
 of the Messiah was in harmony with their belief, that 
 prophets would be sent on earth by Orraazd. It is a 
 fact, that, at the time of their Pilgrimage, there was a 
 wide-spread expectation that this oracle and this pro- 
 phecy were about to be fulfiled ; it is a fact, that, about 
 that time, there were signs in the planets, astrologlcally 
 in harmony with that belief; and it is also a fact, that, 
 about that time, a New Star did appear. 
 
 Yet, from the very nature of the case, an explanation 
 of a very extraordinary event, — and such the Pilgrimage 
 of the Magi was, — an explanation reaching to causes 
 lying far back, where history is imperfect, must, in a 
 measure, be conjectural ; and it would not be reasonable 
 to hold, for a certainty, that, between the Maglan PIl- 
 ofrlmaoe and each and all of the facts of which this ex- 
 planation consists, there was the direct relation of effect 
 and cause. As to some of them, that relation is a 
 matter of conjecture only; but, still, It is by no means 
 such to all of them. As to some of them — the 
 
160 kepler's discovery. 
 
 expectation among the Jews, for instance — there is 
 only a strong probability of this relation ; but, as to 
 others, there is direct evidence of it. Thus, there is 
 evidence in the words of the Magi, that Daniel's pro- 
 phecy, and the oracle of the Star, were among the 
 causes of their Pilgrimage. And it should be added, that, 
 even if they knew nothing of the Hebrew expectation in 
 their time, they might have arrived at the same feeling, 
 from the time-data in that prophecy. There is no direct 
 evidence that the conjunctions of the planets were ob- 
 served by them ; yet they were astrologers, and those 
 celestial phenomena were so marked and repeated, that the 
 intrinsic probability of this is scarcely less than certainty. 
 Undoubtedly this explanation does not — it is not 
 possible that it should — include some, perchance many, 
 peculiar, indispensable, providential occurrences in the 
 lives of these Pilgrims, or in the times before them, 
 that directly and powerfully tended towards this mem- 
 orable Pilgrimage. These will be known only in 
 the time of the resuiTCCtion of the just, when all 
 the wonders of God's grace and man's fidelity shall 
 stand revealed. But, on the other hand, there is 
 such fulness in this explanation, that some parts of it 
 might be varied, and yet detract little from its coherence, 
 or omitted, and detract little from its validity. Wher- 
 ever there is a fact to be explained, — and the Pilgrimage 
 of Magi to Jerusalem is a fact, — an explanation of it, 
 that is clear and perfect, has in itself some evidence of 
 correctness. The explanation, then, given of this Pil- 
 grimage, being made up of facts, and the relations 
 
Kepler's discovery. 161 
 
 between it and them being either matters of direct 
 evidence or of strong probability, is such as, in a 
 purely historical inquiry, involving no religious ques- 
 tions, and provoking no hostile feelings and prejudices, 
 would be accepted as so consistent, probable, and 
 complete, as to be beyond reasonable doubt ; and an 
 explanation might fall short of this, and yet be a 
 sufficient answer to all who, on historic grounds, have 
 decried this Pilmmage to Jerusalem as incredible. 
 
 The latter part of this explanation, alone, would suf- 
 fice for this, so far as they are offended at what they 
 term the astrological cause of the Pilgrimage — that is, 
 the appearing of a Star in the Year of our Lord's Birth. 
 The New Star of the Annus Domini is witnessed to by 
 astronomers of yesterday, as the New Star of 1604 is 
 witnessed to by Kepler and other astronomers of to-day. 
 These late astronomers also attest, that, near the 
 time of our Lord's Birth, there were four conjunctions 
 of planets, believed by astrologers to be significant of 
 great events in Judea. This scientific fact, taken in 
 connection with the other, is a sufficient answer to 
 those who, for the reason assigned, have decried this 
 Pilo^rimao'e as a thino^ incredible : is sufficient to ex- 
 plain what Infidelity has challenged the Church to tell 
 — how, from a Star, the Magi knew the Birth of the 
 King of the Jews. 
 
 This very challenge shows that lack of imagination 
 
 characteristic of all schools of infidelity, under whatever 
 
 name disguised. Of learning, in the sense of mere 
 
 heaps of facts, some of them have more than they know 
 
 11 
 
1G2 
 
 how to use ; but not in the sense of having power to dis- 
 cern the spiritual laws expressed, or intimated, in facts. 
 No great learning, even in the lowest sense of the word, 
 was required in professed critics, to know that the as- 
 trological map of the heavens corresponded with the 
 map of the earth ; and it should not have been difficult 
 for them to have made the easy supposition, that the 
 new Star shone in what was astrologically held to be the 
 Judean quarter of the sky, and there, from its position 
 or time with respect to the planets, indicated, according 
 to the notions of the art, some great event ; and that, 
 through the time-data given by the prophet Daniel, or 
 through the wide-spread belief of the time, the Magi 
 readily interpreted this Judean sign to mean the Coming 
 of some mysterious Person in that country. The most 
 recondite and questionable thing in this supposition, 
 sixteen centuries subsequent to the event, was discovered, 
 by a devout astronomer, to have been the fact. 
 
 That God ordained Kepler should discover this, is 
 very remarkable ; for, if ever, in these latter days, 
 there has been a Magian born, it was Kepler. Dili- 
 gently to search in nature for intimations of God was 
 the characteristic of the Magi ; and this was the breath 
 of life to him, who, through his intuition of relation and 
 harmony pervading all space and time, through his 
 reverential trust in God's word, and through his study 
 of the records of the skies, found the lost fact completing 
 the series of facts that elucidate and confirm the honor- 
 able history of his brethren. Thus, as inspired sages 
 wrought more harmoniously together than they were 
 
KEPLEll's DISCOVERY. 1G3 
 
 aware, so the sages who walk with the Lord in the 
 reahn of nature are unconsciously harmonious in the 
 results of their divinely-guided lives. 
 
 Throughout these inquiries, I have folded the wing 
 of the imagination, and chosen to dwell in the sober 
 precincts of the logical reason ; to dream no dreams, 
 though, hereafter, I might wake to find them true ; that, 
 on every page, I might command a calm, intelligent 
 assent; yet, here, I cannot but point out to the imagi- 
 nation a correspondence that would have charmed the 
 the soul of Kepler. In the astronomical facts redis- 
 covered by him, when viewed in their relation to the 
 Pilgrimage of the Magi, there is that beautiful sym- 
 bolism that runs through all the ways of grace, and is 
 the sacred poetry both of nature and of life. The rays 
 of the three planets, near, yet distinct, correspond to 
 the light of nature, of primitive religion, and of Hebraic 
 revelation, blending their influences in the souls of the 
 Wise ; and the new Star corresponds to the Greater 
 Liorht. 
 
 o 
 
 Up to the moment wdien the Star of the Lord shone 
 in the heavens, there seems, in the antecedent events 
 related to the Coming of the Wise Men, nothing, in the 
 strict sense divine, save what was due to the primeval 
 religion, and to the oracles in the sacred books of the 
 Hebrews ; and a similar origin of the wide-spread belief 
 of the Orient, that, at that time, a Ruler would go forth 
 from Judea, did not secure, for that belief, direct men- 
 tion on the sacred page. All that prepared the Magi 
 to recognize the Star was bound together by a thread 
 
164 kepi^r's discovery. 
 
 of divine weaving ; but, in it, there was no immediate 
 supernatural intervention. It is not strange, then, that 
 St. Matthew, even if he knew of them, did not record 
 the planetary conjunctions. They were facts of nature, 
 left to be made known to the Church, when most needful 
 to it, by one solemnly elected of God to publish the 
 laws and harmonies of the material universe : that, 
 coeval with the Advent of the Lord of the Heavens to 
 the earth, a new Star shone, heralding this through all 
 the worlds, and dating it through all time ; that when 
 He by Whom all things were made, and without 
 Whom, there was not anything, lay in the manger 
 in Bethlehem, the apparent sign of the glory He 
 had before He made the worlds was seen in the 
 Heavens — this, the inspired Evangelist records alike 
 for itself, and for the miracle of its Guiding to its Lord, 
 in virtue of both of which it holds high place on the 
 eternal page. 
 
 Not, then, of those planetary phenomena that Kepler 
 rediscovered, but of a new Star, the Magi speak, when 
 they say, they beheld the Star of the King. This har- 
 monizes, exactly and decisively, with their Coming. 
 Their Pilgrimage might have followed upon the con- 
 junction of the planets ; yet the faith that braved the 
 toils and dangers of their long road is so high-toned, 
 that it requires that decisive intimation. This accom- 
 plished what all else prepared for. It sent them to 
 Jerusalem. History and science elucidate the sublime 
 lesson of the power, the wisdom, and the reward of Faith 
 in the Coming of the Wise Men to the Lord; yet 
 
Kepler's discovery. 165 
 
 the Gospel alone gives, what the records of history 
 and the researches of science, though tending that way, 
 lack, the full explanation, on its human side, of 
 that abounding and unshaken confidence with which 
 these Magi proclaimed, in astonished, affrighted, unbe- 
 lieving Jerusalem, the Birth of its King. 
 
166 THE ASTROLOGICAL ELEMENT 
 
 CHAPTER IX. 
 
 THE ASTROLOGICAL ELEMENT IN THE NARRATIVE. 
 
 The Story of the Wise Men is so fraught with wis- 
 dom above the thoughts of men, is so suited to wants 
 and wishes of the soul, that, were it only a tradition, 
 the Christian would feel, and wisely feel, that it must 
 be true. Yet moral, historical, and scientific arguments 
 have been arrayed against it. 
 
 The scientific, attempt to oppose to it, especially to 
 what is said of the Star's Guiding, the authority of the 
 science, fondly and admiringly thought most exact and 
 complete ; until, a little time ago, the storm of meteors 
 disturbed the calm of the heavens, and the dream of 
 the perfection of Astronomy. 
 
 The historical, bear against an event, referred to by 
 no Evangelist or Apostle, save St. Matthew, and with 
 not a line in the writings of its century, as they now 
 exist, that alludes to it. Without formally so doing, I 
 have answered the <2:reater historical aro^uments aojainst 
 the narrative; and, in another book — on the religious 
 Truth it reveals — I hope so to answer tlie astronomical, 
 as to illustrate the fact, that, so far from the attempt to 
 make any Scripture seem more credible, by arbitrarily 
 lessening the supernatural element in it, ever succeeding. 
 
IX THE NARRATIVE. 167 
 
 the more fearlessly that is set forth in its real grandeur, 
 the more it has power over the reason. 
 
 The moral ars^ument asrainst the narrative is this : 
 the outshining of a new Star at the Birth of Jesus, the 
 coincidence of its appearing with the expectation awak- 
 ened by prophecy, and the Star's Guiding believers in 
 starry influences, countenanced and strengthened the 
 pretended Art of Astrology, which was all delusion and 
 mischief. 
 
 The ready horror at everything that even seems to 
 accredit superstitious or unscientific notions, and, so, 
 mio^ht turn us back towards the Dark Aofes, is such, 
 that it may be well to give a thought to the extent of 
 this alleged strengthening of Astrology. For ages 
 before, and after, St. Matthew's Gospel was written, 
 belief in Astrology w\as so entire, that it could have 
 received no strength from it. If ever it gave it any, 
 it was at the very time when Astrology fell into dis- 
 credit, because that, through the teachings of Chris- 
 tianity, man began to attain to humility in the study of 
 nature. If the signs and wonders revealed, as to the 
 Star of the Lord, then made an impression somewhat 
 favorable to Astrology, this was of small account, as 
 Christianity was to put an end to it. The prevailing 
 magic was somewhat confirmed by the wonders wrought 
 by the Apostles ; the truths they preached w^ere followed 
 by perversions that, without those truths, had never 
 been ; Christianity gave, for the instant, some new 
 strength to superstition ; but, what argument against it 
 are these errors, when the fulness of its light was to dis- 
 
168 THE ASTROLOGICAL ELEMENT 
 
 pel them forever ? Shall the mistakes consequent upon 
 the manifestation of his glory, be charged against the 
 Lord? or shall His works of majesty and grace be 
 barred by human perversions of them? He set the 
 stars in the firmament, with their changes and seasons — 
 the Art of Astrology followed : He set his own Star in 
 the firmament, and some confirmation of the Art fol- 
 lowed. For such things as these, was He to stay his 
 hand in Heaven? 
 
 But the real strength of the argument against the 
 fiicts, that the Lord used the astral lore of the Magi as 
 a medium of communication with them, and led them 
 in ways familiar to their thoughts as astrologers, lies 
 not in the harm that followed these things, be that more, 
 or less, or none, but in the idea that they were wrong. 
 This we meet, in part, by being more just to the astrol- 
 ogy of the Magi, than when we seemed to concede it 
 was all error and mischief. The germ of oldest science 
 was the divination of a preestablished resemblance or 
 harmony between the spiritual and material worlds — the 
 grand thought, that all the creation of the one God must 
 be one whole. From this, as from the idea of one God, 
 out of which sprung the idea of one universe, the soul 
 rapidly fell off into low notions of the creation, and of 
 the Creator ; but each left its uneffaceable traces on the 
 science and on the religion of the earliest ages. As- 
 trology was one form of the aspiration to verify the 
 oldest, the most religious, of scientific ideas. It held 
 that there is a correspondence and a sympathy between 
 the material and the spiritual worlds, and, hence, it 
 
IN THE NARRATIVE. 169 
 
 looked for coincidences between the phenomena in the 
 skies, and the fates of men. The thought is grandly 
 true ; but cannot be applied with the minuteness with 
 which astrology claimed to apply it, because the limited 
 faculties of man cannot grasp all those harmonies that 
 make all spirits and all worlds one sentient whole. 
 
 Fools mock at the contrasted hope and failure of the 
 astrologer; but high aims, though seldom entirely suc- 
 cessful, are as seldom entirely fruitless. All that man 
 accomplishes springs from them. Without the vain 
 aspirations of the youth, would never be achieved the 
 little of the man, that forms so humble a contrast to the 
 visions of the boy ; and what is true of the individual 
 is true of the race. 
 
 Astrology was not for naught. As Chemistry of 
 Alchemy, so Astronomy was born of Astrology. As- 
 trology was not useless. It is something, that it proved 
 that what it aimed at was impossible, so that, with 
 humbler hope, man might seek the attainable. Next to 
 him who shows that the difficult is possible, is he who 
 shows that it is impossible. Each serves the Lord : 
 the one, by opening a path where none seemed to be ; 
 the other, by closing up the road of delusion. 
 
 The first chemical experiments were made by Al- 
 chemists ; the first maps of the heavens, by Astrologers. 
 The art of Astrology, like every human art and every 
 human science, was blended truth and error; and if 
 the Lord could not have conversed with Astrologers, 
 then he cannot converse with men of science at all, in 
 and through their pursuits ; and there are no limits to 
 
170 THE ASTROLOGICAL ELEMENT 
 
 the exclusion of the Sph-it of God from the soul of man 
 that logically follows ; for all human conceptions, alike 
 of things material and of things spiritual, have in them 
 some quality of error. If the Lord cannot commune 
 with souls in which vain aspirations are, and thoughts 
 that err, he cannot commune with man. It were better 
 to adore, than to cavil at the self-devotion of his Spirit, 
 who, unrepelled, even by guilt, mercifully follows men, 
 as they wander away from Him, down into the drear 
 wastes of error and sin. 
 
 The Wise Men were not only different from those 
 self-styled Magians who disgraced the honor of the 
 name, but were the few, in whom whatever was most 
 spiritual in their order found its most perfect expression. 
 The errors of the Zoroastrian religion, and the darker 
 aspects of their order, have as little to do with our con- 
 ception of these men, as " the vain traditions " of the 
 Jews, or the cruelty of the Pharisees, with our concep- 
 tion of the believing souls in Jerusalem. These were 
 the elect few of the Jews ; those, of the Magi. 
 
 Their religion fostered, in the more spiritual of the 
 Magi, a reverential, believing spirit, that looked, in 
 nature and in life, for the presence and purpose of God. 
 In virtue of this God-seeking spirit, the Wise Men, as 
 reverently they watched the stars in their courses, made 
 the sublimest discovery in the heavens ever made by 
 man. Who will restore to Astronomy this lost glory? 
 When will the Magian be born, who, amid the glitter- 
 ing hosts on high, will point out, again, the Star of 
 Bethlehem ? 
 
IN THE NARRATIVE. 171 
 
 These Magians very truthfully conceived that the God 
 of Heaven was wamno^ real war with sin, and that his 
 triumph over Ahriman would be wrought out, not 
 through the foolishness of culture, philosophy, or science, 
 but by prophets sent from God, of whom the last, 
 mighty to save, as a man, would conquer the Evil One. 
 In spiritual souls, this truth was persuasive to a living 
 faith in God, that waited and watched for His redemp- 
 tion. The God of Heaven honored this spirit in the 
 Wise Men. These Magians watched, without ceasing, 
 in the material and spiritual worlds, for the Divine ; 
 and it was divinely appropriate that they should be 
 led to find Him, in whom met Heaven and Earth, Hu- 
 manity and Divinity. 
 
 All the supernatural in the Story of the Wise Men is 
 self-proved : the narrative of their presence with the 
 Lord is self-authenticating throughout, when the natural, 
 in their history, is understood. For the spirit of these 
 men having been such as it was, the Lord must have 
 brought them as near to himself as it was then possible 
 for them to come, and in ways fitted to their religiously 
 scientific spirit. 
 
 Wise through faith beyond their knowledge, their 
 hearts were so in sympathy with the purpose of God to 
 " send his own Son into the world, not to condemn the 
 world, but that, through Him, the world might be 
 saved," that they believed in a sacred promise of a Re- 
 deemer to come ; and when these astronomers looked 
 unto the heavens, to behold there the predicted sign of 
 His coming on the earth, the Lord set His bright and 
 
172 THE ASTROLOGICAL ELEMENT 
 
 morning Star before them ; and when, through Faith, 
 they came to His own city, found there no knowledge 
 of the discovery they made afar off, went out from 
 thence, waited on by no Pharisee, no scribe, no priest, 
 strangers in the Holy Land, seeking, unaided of men, 
 its Lord, the rays of His Star led them, until the attest- 
 ing splendor stood over where the Lord lay. Science 
 has no story like this, of recognition from the Eternal 
 mind ! Keligion, few more touching words than these 
 of God's kindness to men in darkness, seeking for the 
 Light ; in the night of heathenism, for the Star of Jacob ! 
 Great their Faith ; great its reward ! The roll of the 
 men of old time who obtained a good report through 
 Faith is written in the Epistle to the Hebrews ; the 
 roll of honor of the new time opens with the Wise Men. 
 They preach forever, that to Faith wisdom is given. 
 By Faith they crossed plains, deserts, mountains, and 
 journeyed far to the Holy City. The capital knew not 
 its King. In little Bethlehem they found only a maiden 
 mother tending an infant; yet, with undaunted Faith, 
 "when they saw the Young Child and His mother,' 
 they fell down and worshipped Him ; " and, setting forth 
 truths greater than they knew, they offered, to the Sou 
 of Man and Son of God, myrrh, hinting at the resur- 
 rection of the dead ; the royal gold ; and frankincense 
 that breathes of prayer, — "myrrh to a mortal, gold to 
 a kin or frankincense to God." ^ 
 
 ^ This mystic significance of the gifts is marked by all the 
 earlier Christians who refer to them. The learned Arch- 
 
IN THE NARRATIVE. 173' 
 
 The Mediaeval Age, with passion, cried, these men 
 were Kings ! Let us catch the thought, roll on the 
 cry. Indeed, they were Kings — of God anointed ! — 
 Sovereigns in the realm of truth ! 
 
 On the bank of the Rhine the zeal of toilino^ centu- 
 ries strove to build, to their praise, the noblest fabric of 
 mediasval art ; its skyward-pointing spires are yet rising 
 higher and higher toward the heavens ; and so the 
 honor that should be given them among men is yet an 
 unfinished thing. 
 
 bishop Trench says, " The earliest writer, I believe, who 
 makes this application, at least of those who have come 
 down to us, is Irenagus." — Star of the Wise Men. 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 175 
 
 CHAPTER X. 
 
 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 The words of St. Matthew have here been inter- 
 preted in the clear light of the idea that they were 
 selected with a thous^htfulness of wisdom. This idea is 
 not altogether in harmony with the notion that the 
 Gospels are rude chronicles, whose power is manifestly 
 divine, because of their humility of style. But it is in 
 harmony with the fact. All Scripture shows that inspi- 
 ration was given to fitting recipients ; and that this 
 fitness depended on mental, no less certainly than on 
 moral, endowments ; on qualities of the head, as surely 
 as on those of the heart. 
 
 St. Matthew has not the precision of a diffuse style, — 
 if, indeed, such a style ever is precise, — but of a style 
 that, saying little, means much ; where every line and 
 word can be justified ; and where precision ever is, 
 though, to the superficial eye, it may not seem to be 
 there. Thus, by their title, he exactly describes those 
 who came to Jerusalem, and his geographical phrases 
 are definite. 
 
 But, it will be said, this finds too much in his words ; 
 all versions of the Gospel overlook his distinction be- 
 tween the East and the Far East ; and the general 
 
176 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 comment says, these terms signify only that the Wise 
 Men came from one of the four winds. This is true; 
 and because it is so, there is some reason to have charity 
 for those who, in consequence of this failure in inter- 
 pretation, pronounce their history a fable ; and the more 
 reason, as this low interpretation of the Evangelist's 
 words, at the beginning, running through the narrative, 
 debases it into an incongruous legend, where the Magi 
 are dishonored into fortune-tellers, and the Star of the 
 Lord into a Jack-o'-lantern. 
 
 But, even with this low notion as to St. Matthew's 
 words, our conclusions can be maintained. Thus far 
 St. Matthew has been vindicated, as any other historian 
 might have been ; but the erroneous notions as to the 
 force of some of his words require that the true inter- 
 pretation of them should be strengthened by conclusions 
 drawn from the fact, that St. Matthew was not a his- 
 torian merely, but also an Evangelist ; from the fact, 
 that the inspired writers sometimes uttered truths, the 
 significance and the relations of which they knew but in 
 part, yet whose expression, having in it a divine element 
 of perfection, has, in time, conveyed to the Church 
 more full and precise ideas than to them. 
 
 When, to the high historic qualities of the Evangelists, 
 there was superadded the enlightening, restraining, and 
 guiding of the Spirit of all Wisdom, there was a Gos- 
 pel, fourfold in form, yet one in spirit; reproducing a 
 Life so mysterious, that, to reproduce it in such per- 
 fection, surpassed the human genius. To believe this, is 
 no disparagement of their natural gifts ; and their genius 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 177 
 
 should not be depreciated to honor their inspiration. 
 This honors neither. Those who appreciate them as 
 historians will not doubt their inspiration. 
 
 All that sense and genius could, they gave their gos- 
 pels. Each imparted to his something of his own soul. 
 Beyond this, Divine Wisdom gave to each of the gos- 
 pels, and to the Gospel as a whole, what human genius 
 was not competent to give — a fulness and precision 
 of wisdom in every line and word. It watched over 
 thoughts, words, images ; so adjusting the relations 
 of these, that Scripture is one Scripture. It made it 
 vital with one life, breathing through all its forms, 
 whether history, or biography, or precept, or doctrine ; 
 whether proverb, or parable, or song, or prophecy, 
 or epistle. Not nicer the adjustments of the human 
 frame, not more wonderful the unity of the world, than 
 the unity of this creation. Hence, in its study, adjust- 
 ment, relation, harmony should be looked for, as in the 
 study of nature. As there, one thing throws light upon 
 another ; as there, analogy, proportion, or resemblance 
 is the great instrument of discovery, whose power is 
 inexhaustible, whose results are so certain, — so it is in 
 the Scriptures : in neither is mechanical cohesion ; in 
 each is the unity of Life, and from the same Life- 
 giving Word. 
 
 As correspondences in nature are sought for with 
 wide observation and the microscopic eye, so they should 
 be sought for in Scripture; and, as there is no doubt 
 of their reality when once they are seen in nature, how- 
 ever minute or far-severed in space or time, so should 
 12 
 
178 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 there be higher conviction, even, were it possible, of 
 the reality of the like in this higher world. All Scrip- 
 ture, then, — especially that of the Evangelists, its 
 heart, whence flows the blood, in which is the life, and 
 whither it reflows, — all Scripture, and, most of all, 
 that which reproduces the Life of the Lord, is ever to 
 be studied with inquiry into its relations to all other 
 Scripture. 
 
 Something of the undoubting faith in analogy, resem- 
 blance, harmony, proportion, and law, that guides 
 science, has quickened the Church in its researches in 
 the world of Scripture, as to doctrine ; but less so, as to 
 that wonderful apparatus of personal feelings and inci- 
 dents, and of great national events of biography and 
 history, through which and in which the doctrines are, 
 in a great measure, revealed and taught. The historical 
 element is the chief element, so far as form goes, in the 
 Scriptures ; and there should be the same faith in the 
 precision of its teaching, and the perfection of its rela- 
 tions, that there is in those of purely didactic Scripture. 
 
 In all Scripture there is a divine element of certainty ; 
 and, for the full understanding of Scripture, it is neces- 
 sary to compare one part of it with another, in a way 
 that has no parallel in human writings. Hen/ce, in 
 Scripture, words and phrases may have an exactness, a 
 depth or breadth of meaning, and relations to other 
 Scripture, even beyond what they had in the thoughts 
 of the writer. The meaning of the words cannot be 
 changed ; but the conception of the writer may receive 
 greater precision, greater depth or breadth of eignifi- 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 179 
 
 cance, while it remains essentially the same ; as, in 
 science, a law may have greater exactness, wider com- 
 pass, and suggest to one mind more relations than to 
 another, and yet be expressed in the same words. The 
 language of Scripture is a fountain, not a reservoir. 
 
 St. Matthew w^rote his gospel with such accuracy as 
 his best efforts could secure ; and, beyond this, with a 
 wisdom that gave to it perfection, alike in itself, and in 
 its relations to other Scripture. If, then, his language 
 has guided us to conclusions, the only objection to which 
 seems to be that they are too exact, and, at the same 
 time, too far-reaching, to be gathered from what many 
 take to be very indefinite words, these things may be 
 referred to his inspiration, as well as to his genius ; his 
 inspiration authorizing the giving to terms in his gospel, 
 as part of the whole of Scripture, a precision and a rich- 
 ness of meaning not to be given to independent words. 
 
 Thus, the phrases, the East and the Far East, if 
 indefinite in themselves, may become definite, through 
 their use in more ancient Scripture, for Babylonia and 
 Persia. His knowledge of the scriptural relations of 
 what he recorded must have been imperfect. The Lord 
 himself, alone, knoweth them all. No perfect knowl- 
 edge of them can be predicated, even of the Evangelist. 
 The workmanship was divine, the workman was human. 
 But to overlook relations is not to deny them j and, if 
 he did not know all the relations of what he recorded of 
 the Wise Men to other Scripture, it does not prove that 
 they did not pxist, 
 
 J would not bp misurjtlerstQocl, as if applying this to 
 
180 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 the words before considered. I think it is clear, beyond 
 reasonable doubt, that his own insight into the relations 
 of what he was narrating may have guided, and did 
 guide him to them ; that he chose a popular phrase — 
 " from the Far East " — to describe whence the Pilgrims 
 were, not only because it was such, but also because 
 its use in the Old Testament made it so peculiarly sig- 
 nificant in pointing out those relations, that he would 
 have been justified in this, had it not been in popular 
 use at all ; and also that he added it to the title Alagi, 
 to describe them beyond all mistake, because, in the 
 Septuagint, persons so called had been located in Baby- 
 lonia, that is, in "the East;" and again, that there 
 were other relations he did not point out in terms, — 
 for instance, that between the Oracle of Balaam and the 
 Coming of the Magi, intimated in their own words, — 
 because he thought it needless ; and it should be need- 
 less. The history of Balaam is one leaf, the history 
 of the Wise Men is another, from the great, marvel- 
 lous book of God alone — the true history of the 
 world's religion, of which so little is, or can be, known 
 by man ; and no one, who has any idea of the unity of 
 Scripture, will doubt the relation between these two 
 leaves of the unrevealed history of the Gentiles, 
 transcribed into the revealed history of the Son of 
 God. The Story of Balaam and of the AVise j\ien are 
 correlative ; they illustrate the whole Gentile religion, 
 revealing that, everywhere, the Spirit strove with men, 
 showing the triumph of grace resisted or obeyed, and 
 the contrast of the results of each in the fates of men. 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 181 
 
 Correspondences like these are so characteristic of 
 the Bible, that he who does not understand something 
 of them, does not understand the Bible at all. By 
 itself, each might seem a thing of chance ; yet the many 
 can have come only from uniform design. Each may 
 be a thread so fine as scarcely to be seen ; the many 
 form massive cords, holding the whole of the sacred 
 volume firmly together. Correspondences like these, 
 in a measure, produce that sense of unity often so 
 deeply felt, rather than clearly seen, in the Bible. It is 
 a unity, in a multitude of incidents, described by men 
 to whom only a part thereof was known ; unity in truths 
 hinted at by one, partially disclosed by another, revealed 
 by a third, or made clear in the course of events. It is 
 a unity as to truths — some deeper than the intuitions 
 of man, others beyond his experience ; a unity in writers 
 thousands of years apart, writing in different countries, 
 and in different languages ; a unity that can be ex- 
 plained only by the fact that God was with them. 
 
 In the fact that St. Matthew's narrative is a divine 
 record of events especially within a divine economy, 
 there is, also, an independent verification of the conclu- 
 sion drawn from it as history — that the Pilgrims to 
 Bethlehem were Persians. If the term that points this 
 out be thought somewhat indecisive, it becomes decisive 
 through the consideration, that what the words suggest, 
 at least, as possible, is required by the harmonies of the 
 kingdom of grace ; inspiration being supposed, in this, 
 as in so many places, to have guided the writer to a 
 phrase, that was to become more definite to the Church 
 |:han to him. 
 
182 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 For there is a kingdom of grace, having its harmonies, 
 even as the kins^dom of nature hath. To those who- 
 have no hearts to feel them, they are as if they were not. 
 Their notions as to this kingdom are as blank as those 
 of a blind man as to the kingdom of Light. A man 
 without eyes might grope about, with a tape-measure, 
 among the houses in Jerusalem, and his measurements 
 somewhat avail ; of such value are the researches of 
 men like Strauss in the spiritual Jerusalem. As to 
 some things of an unspiritual kind, their fingers may 
 avail something ; but the soul-inspiring harmonies of 
 the kingdom of grace, such cannot know. Can men, 
 born deaf, know the symphonies of Beethoven? Such 
 critics of harmonies, poring over the printed notes of 
 " The Creation," and measuring, w^ith scale and dividers, 
 here and there, on the silent page, may detect typo- 
 graphical errors, make some shrewd and more absurd 
 remarks on the number, arrangement, and proportion 
 of the dots, be witty and wise over those who see what 
 they cannot see, feel what they cannot feel, in the mys- 
 terious scroll ; but, though the mighty master of the 
 organ unroll, in volumes of majestic sound, the music 
 expressed in those mystic characters, all is a blank to 
 them, save what they glean from the mute symbols of 
 a melody they have no faculty to hear. Our knowledge 
 is not to be called in question, because darkened souls, 
 like Kenan's, know it not. A world of sight and sound 
 is not less sure, because such men have no hearing and 
 no sight. The spiritual world, with its truths and har- 
 monies, is none the less a world, because they 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MAT'JHEW. 183 
 
 are dead. Its truths and harmonies are the only 
 realities. 
 
 The harmonies of the kingdom of the Lord require 
 that the witnesses of his grace to all nations should have 
 come from the nation that had profited most by his 
 grace. The Lord honors those worthy of honor ; and 
 the honor of witnessino^ first of the nations to his Cominof 
 on the Earth could have been won only by the most 
 deserving of the nations of old. That this was the Per- 
 sian, is known from Scripture. With this, all else that 
 is known of them accords. Viewinof it in the lio^ht of 
 human passions, their preeminence might be denied : 
 it might be said, the state of the Great King was 
 less than that of Augustus ; the glory of Cyrus is pale 
 before that of Alexander ; the philosophy of the Greeks 
 outvies that of the Magi ; the beauty of Grecian art 
 makes comparison with it idle. But the worth of a 
 people is not to be determined by splendor of palaces, 
 though the earth has known of regal state nothing more 
 sublime than the court of the Great King ; nor by 
 armies, though the Persian swept "from India to Ethio- 
 pia." It is the religious element in the national char- 
 acter, whose presence in one people, more than in an- 
 other, makes that people more in favor with God, and 
 should make them higher in honor wdth man. The 
 Athenians worshipped the cunning work of the mortal 
 hand of Phidias ; the Romans, a deified Emperor; Per- 
 sia, the God of Heaven ; and the God of Heaven ap- 
 pointed the Persian, who built no altars to the starry 
 hosts, no temple to gods of gold or stone, to build for 
 
184 INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 
 
 Him his own house in Jerusalem. When, therefore, 
 his Evangelist describes the Witnesses of the Nations to 
 the Advent of the Lord of the Nations by a term that 
 is the distinctive title of the Sacred Order of the Per- 
 sians, though sometimes used in another sense, it is not 
 to be doubted that the Pilgrims, thus divinely described, 
 vs^ere Persians, since, thus, there is found, in their Wit- 
 ness to the Lord, the perfection belonging to the har- 
 monies of the Kingdom of Grace. 
 
 The fact, that the Persians rejected Christ, might 
 lead us to doubt whether the Wise Men were Persians, 
 were it not for the more strange and mournful fact, that 
 the most faithful and the most favored of the nations, 
 the chosen and peculiar people, rejected the Master, in 
 Person. Each has been severely punished. But the 
 finger of the Lord traced for the Persians the bounds of 
 their habitation. He has preserved their race ; and, in 
 spite of long centuries of demoralization, they are, to- 
 day, the finest people of Asia. 
 
 Of the Shemitic ftimily of nations, only the Hebrews 
 of old, of the Aryan family, only the Persian, can be 
 said to have kept the faith. The Persians restored the 
 Hebrews to their own country ; and, in the fulness of 
 time, Hebrew Apostles, going out from thence, taught 
 the truth anew to the Aryan nations, who then received 
 again the priceless inheritance they had wasted in riotous 
 living, and more than they had before. The Jew and 
 the Persian — let him that thinketh he standeth take 
 heed lest he fall — rejected the Word made flesh, who 
 is the brightness of the Father's glory, and the express 
 
INSPIRATION OF ST. MATTHEW. 185 
 
 image of liis Person ; yet the Jew and the Persian abide 
 the time, when the nations that are now, in their stead, 
 the worshippers of God, — for no man cometh to the 
 Father but by the Son, — shall return to them all they 
 received from them, and more. The set time cometh 
 when the great cycle of the mercy of God to these 
 nations will be rounded into its predicted fulness of 
 completion. The set time cometh when Jerusalem shall 
 no longer be trodden down of the Gentiles, and when 
 the Persians will follow their Wise Men of old. 
 
186 SU3IMARY. 
 
 CHAPTER XI. 
 
 SUMMARY. 
 
 This explanation of the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem 
 has, here and there, something of the manner of a 
 defence of the evangelical narrative. It has been con- 
 strained to this by the tone of faith within the Church, 
 lowered by the too prevailing unbelief of the world — 
 the reflex of an effect on the world produced by some 
 lack of fulness of faith within the Church itself, as cold- 
 ness in the extremities of the body is caused by feeble 
 pulsations of the heart, and then this coldness reacts 
 on the heart. 
 
 With some, the guarded movement of such argument 
 may chill the glow of feeling ; with some, the first 
 knowledge of a doubt may be given in the answer to it : 
 yet something of this manner seems to be required by 
 the peculiarities of an age whose spirit summons before 
 it all times, all institutions, all theories of morals, of 
 society, of government, of art — all science and all 
 creeds ; and, with somewhat of keener intuition and a 
 larger experience than former ages, would weigh all 
 that has been, and is, and is to be, in its scanty and ill- 
 adjusted balance. To call it an age of unbelief is rather 
 extreme ; but it is not an age of faith, though abounding 
 
SUMMARY. 187 
 
 in credulity. It is an age of inquiry, ^Yhen " many run 
 to and fro, and knowledge is increased." 
 
 In the presence of its restless propensity to search 
 into everything, the Church, for her own sake, and for 
 that of the world, may well mark the deep foundations 
 of her walls, and tell her battlements ; she may well 
 survey, in accordance with the canons of modern his- 
 torical criticism, as by her adapted to her own fields 
 her treasures of history ; she may well strive to commend 
 her sacred records, and all that in them is, to her own 
 critical reason ; with greater zeal than ever before, may 
 well endeavor to clear up the obscure, to harmonize 
 seeming contradictions, and to confirm the truth of the 
 Scriptures, in ways that the spiritual wants of other 
 times did not so urgently require. 
 
 It is well the infidel should see that the faith of the 
 Church is as intelligent as it is to him mysterious. To 
 let him see less than this, is to give him over to unbe- 
 lief. But the heart determines the intellect. Truth 
 not felt by the heart cannot be known as truth by the 
 mind. Except a man be born again, he cannot see the 
 kingdom of God. The most, then, that can be done, 
 is to strengthen in the Church her own perceptions of 
 her own truths, that from her there may be more and 
 more breathed into the world a feeling, that there is a 
 known world above its knowing ; that even as one born 
 blind longs to seethe blue heavens on high, and the firm 
 earth, he is convinced are, but beholds not, so man may 
 yearn for a heart that may see God. 
 
 Historical evidence cannot exorcise the demon of un- 
 
188 SUMMARY. 
 
 belief. Historical evidence addresses the mind : he 
 lodges in the heart, whose subtle influences sway the 
 intellect. But the Christian may have less or more of 
 his own light, perceptions less or more clear, truths less 
 or more perceived in their harmonies ; and in proportion 
 as his own knowledge of his own realm of knowledge is 
 increased, his soul will have more of strength ; the 
 world will, more and more, be constrained to feel the 
 inferiority of her knowledge ; and thus the Church will, 
 at length, regain in herself, and establish in the world, 
 the full conviction of her intellectual supremacy. 
 
 The argument, then, in this inquiry, is addressed to 
 Christians. If it quicken their faith, it will, at length, 
 through them, reach the unbeliever, so far as he has the 
 capacity to be reached by it. As free citizens, then, of 
 the City of God, with the ideas and prepossessions be- 
 longing to such, knowing that the thoughts of the 
 Divine Spirit run through the Ages, and that slight 
 indications in Scripture point to His far-continuing 
 purposes and distant but foreseen ends, let us recall the 
 argument that has passed before us. First : It has 
 been seen that the Magi believed that the God of Heaven 
 intervened in the affiiirs of men, and that Ormazd, in 
 his appointed times, would send on earth prophets, who 
 would work wonders for the Kingdom of Light, and the 
 last and greatest of whom would utterly destroy the 
 Kino:dom of Darkness. Second : That there was with 
 the Magi a Hebrew prophet, who foreknew the Coming 
 of the Lord, and the Time thereof, having power and 
 opportunity to impress these facts on them ; and who 
 
SUMMARY. 189 
 
 could point, in confirmation of what he revealed, to an 
 oracle not from Hebrew lips, in which it was foretold 
 that a Star would be the Sign of His appearing. 
 Third : That there were data from which the Magi 
 might have computed the time of this prediction, and, 
 consequently, of the starry omen ; that this j)i'opbecy 
 and calculation might have been preserved in writing by 
 them, and were not likely to have been lost in an order 
 professionally conservative of sacred records, traditions, 
 and mystic lore ; and that the expectation of some spir- 
 itual Ruler to be born in the house of Jacob, thus 
 enkindled among the Magi, might have been kept from 
 dying out, by the presence of Hebrews in Persia. 
 Fourth : That certain of the Magi were dwelling or 
 sojourning in the country between the Tigris and the 
 Euphrates, at a time when the expectation was deeply 
 inwrouo^ht into the minds of some of the multitude of 
 Hebrew^s living in that region, that the appointed hour 
 of the Birth of their Messiah in Judea was nigh ; and 
 that, about that time, there were displayed, in the 
 heavens, signs in the planets, believed by these Magi, 
 as astrologers, to portend that some great event had 
 come, or was about to come to pass in Judea — signs 
 awakening them to diligent watch for the predicted Star. 
 Fifth : That these Magi journeyed from Babylonia on a 
 Pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and proclaimed in that City, 
 in the very terms of the Hebrew Prophet, and with a 
 clear reference to the ancient, extra- Judean oracle, that 
 they had seen the Star of the King of the Jews. Thus 
 what St. Matthew records is, to this extent, explained, 
 
190 SUxMMAllY. 
 
 and so confirmed. The Pilgrimage itself makes it 
 probable that certain other events took place ; and these 
 probable events, taken together with other known events, 
 explain the Pilgrimage. It thus ceases to be an isolated 
 thing, pressing on belief with the heavy weight of any- 
 thing, however well attested, that cannot be connected 
 to aught previous as its intelligible reason, and so 
 seeming an eiFect without a cause ; and it is, at once, 
 placed in a line with other facts ; for all history is a 
 chain of recorded and inferred events. From facts that, 
 appearing of record, are supposed to be known, other 
 facts, not of record, are inferred ; and this must be ac- 
 cepted as history, or there can be no history. A prob- 
 ability that things were so is all that can be attained 
 to, as to the greater part of human affairs ; and this of 
 things in the immediate present, as well as in the remote 
 past. Such a reasonable probability is all that can be 
 attained to as to the course of events preceding the out- 
 shining of the Star, that, in connection with it, led the 
 Magi to Jerusalem ; and this is all that the wants of 
 Faith require. For it is enough to say to those who 
 assume that there can be no explanation of such a Pil- 
 grimage, it might have been in this way ; while it is 
 freely and gladly admitted, that this touching lesson of 
 the condescending mercy of God, this high example 
 of faith in man, must forever depend on the sole and 
 sufficient witness of one, who was not only a truthful 
 historian, but also a divinely-inspired Evangelist. 
 
 Thus far, purely historical or scientific confirmations 
 of it have been marked in this review of trains of events 
 
SUM^IARY. 191 
 
 that seem related to the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem ; but, 
 to the Christian mind, there is evidence for it of a some- 
 what different kind. The Christian Church, like the 
 Hebrews of old, has ever held that Balaam prophesied 
 of the Messiah. "There shall come a Star out of Jacob 
 and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel,"^ — according to 
 the ideas of him who spake, and those who heard it — 
 foretold a King, of whom a Star in heaven would be the 
 sign ; and, as this was the only way in which this oracle 
 could be understood by them, it is the only way in 
 which it should be interpreted ; and it was thus inter- 
 preted by the Jews. The attestation is correspondent 
 with the prediction. Both alike — prophecy and wit- 
 ness — are from out the Gentile world. Each is a 
 testimony to the Lord of the nations from without the 
 elect nation ; and this correspondence is the more com- 
 plete, as each testimony comes from those whom the 
 world believed to have mystic power to read in the 
 book of God's secrecy. 
 
 The prophecy was uttered to kings, militant against 
 the people of God, in their pride of place and power, 
 as, in arms, they stood to bar the way of Israel into 
 the Land of Promise and of rest. Its fulfilment was 
 uttered to Herod, the friend of Caesar, and so to powers 
 of the world, in whose hearts was the intent to bar the 
 way of the Lord to his rightful kingdom over all the 
 earth. 
 
 It is most reasonable to suppose, that, if a Star was 
 
 ^ Numbers xxiv. 1 7. 
 
192 SUMMARY. 
 
 foretold, its appearing would be told to Jerusalem, and 
 to all the world ; that when the sign was visible to hu- 
 man eyes, there would be something providential that 
 would call to it the attention of the Jews, and ever 
 afterward fasten upon it the thought and the memory 
 of man. This — wanting which the annals of our Faith 
 had seemed manifestly imperfect — the narrative in St. 
 Matthew supplies ; and it agrees with what the harmo- 
 nies of a plan predetermined, from the first, in the 
 thought of God, would seem to human intellects to re- 
 quire, — judging, as such can only wisely judge, of the 
 thoughts of God after the event ; for though to fore- 
 know the ways of God is given only to inspired souls, 
 yet to see the fitness of beauty in His work, once visibly 
 wrought out, whether in nature, or, more marvellous 
 still, in the realm of life, is the appropriate office of 
 the God-given intellect of man. 
 
 Again : in these few strangers in Bethlehem, the 
 Church sees the prophetic types and prophecy of the 
 many, who, after them, were to come from every 
 nation under heaven ; and, thus viewed, their presence 
 is a sign, that, disclosing its significance afterwards, 
 authenticates that presence, by proving there was in it 
 something divine. What is written of these strangers 
 at the cradle of the Lord is a parable of prophetic mean- 
 ing, reaching far onward, and reciting the future of 
 His kingdom. Events in the lives of men are often 
 ordered with a dramatic propriety, that reveals to the 
 believing spirit the intervention of higher powers in the 
 concerns of mortals ; and if ever this is manifest, we 
 
SIBIMARY. 193 
 
 may well believe it was so in that Life for whose mani- 
 festation the Life of man was made. The illumined 
 sages of the dark heathen world seek the shrine of truth, 
 and the place where the Lord was to be born, pointed 
 out to them by its priests, but, without their further 
 aid, come to the cradle of the Messiah. No long pro- 
 cession of priests, no Sanhedrim, marshals these Pil- 
 grims to the shrine. Mysterious picture of what is to 
 be — the Jews not there, yet there the Representatives 
 of the Nations of the Earth ! 
 
 Again : in the strangers who came and worshipped 
 the Infant Lord, the Church, in virtue of that vision 
 which belongs to her because she is the Church, recog- 
 nizes the Witnesses of the Grace of the Universal Lord 
 to all nations — the Representatives of the Wise and 
 Good of the World. Thus viewing them, the main fact 
 in their history autlienticates itself. The Reason de- 
 mands it ; the soul is evidence for it : for if, as many 
 insist, — perchance seeking thus to convict the Scrip- 
 ture of narrowness and partiality, — the Universal Lord, 
 pitying all nations, denied grace to none. He must have 
 determined the course of nations, other than the He- 
 brew, with reference to His Coming ; and all reason 
 calls aloud for some recognition of this by those nations ; 
 for the soul of man catches something of the thought 
 of God, awakens to some foresight of what He is bring- 
 ing to pass in the earth, when events of a world-wide 
 concern, ordered from afar, converge to His aim, and 
 His preparation points to His intent. Thus, in the 
 sacred Eclogue of Virgil, that illustrates the affinity 
 13 
 
194 SUMMARY. 
 
 of prophet and bard, the glowing presentiment of an 
 auspicious dominion awoke. Thus it was, that, near 
 the Christian era, old Hebrew prophecy, foretelling that 
 dominion, so began to harmonize with the presentience 
 of man, that it was commonly talked of through all the 
 East. But since *^the end and aim of all human his- 
 tory was to prepare the way for Christ's appearing," 
 the Reason, unsatisfied even with these intimations of a 
 prescience in man of the kingdom of Heaven, demands 
 from out the heart of the expectant world a more 
 marked recognition of the Coming of the Lord ; expects 
 of his providence something, in the Israel outside of 
 Israel, more distinctly corresponding to the revelation 
 made to Simeon, that he should not see death before 
 he had seen the Lord's Christ, and to the shepherds, 
 to whom the angel told, "unto you is born this day a 
 Saviour, which is Christ the Lord." By its answer to 
 these requirements, the Story of the Wise Men lays 
 strong hold on the reason of the Church : it lays strong 
 hold, too, on the heart of the Church ; for in the Com- 
 inof of the Wise Men she finds the assurance of her 
 earnest, pleasing hope — that all who sought for Him 
 were guided of the Lord. In them, her oft-Yecurring 
 question, as she muses on the Grace of other days, — 
 How near to the Lord did the nearest to Plim of the 
 heathen come? — is answered, when the Representatives 
 of the Wise and Good of the world " saw the Young 
 Child." 
 
 As nothing comes by chance in the kingdom of Na- 
 ture, so nothing comes by chance in the kingdom of 
 
SU3D1ARY. 195 
 
 Grace. As the West did not keep the tradition of a 
 Saviour to come so well as did the East, it is in ac- 
 cordance with the law uttered by the Messiah, — "to 
 him that hath shall be given," — that Magi from the 
 Far East were the first-fruits of the heathen. 
 
 Thus the Law, under which Truth is revealed and 
 Grace is given, thus the presentiments of the soul, 
 harmonize with the statement of St. Matthew — that, 
 from the people who Lad most faithfully kept the Truth 
 revealed to the Fathers of mankind, from an order of 
 Sages over whom Daniel presided, from that country 
 where Esther reigned a Queen, came the Witnesses of 
 the Nations to the cradle of the Lord. 
 
APPENDIX. 
 
 I. THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 II. RELATION OF THE I'ERSIAN AND THE HEBREW 
 RELIGIONS. 
 
 197 
 
/ 
 
 APPENDIX. 
 
 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 In Chapter II., the meaning of these terms, as used 
 by St. Matthew, is determined by geographical and 
 historical considerations. As that Chapter, in its pres- 
 ent form, sufficiently accomplishes its immediate pur- 
 pose, and the longer consideration of its subject there, 
 would break in too much on the unity of the book, I 
 have transferred to this place an important part of it, 
 as originally written. It points out a relation be- 
 tween the two Greek terms used by St. Matthew and 
 two corresponding words in the Hebrew, that justi- 
 fies the explanation of his use of the former, so far as 
 it depends upon antecedent Hebraic usage ; and it an- 
 swers objections that may be brought against the posi- 
 tions taken in that Chapter. 
 
 In descriptive terms the Hebrew language was very 
 rich.^ It had five names for the West, and seven for 
 the South. For the East it had two, Kedem and 
 
 ^ " No less than four different Hebrew words are ren- 
 dered in English by the term valley." — Robinson's Physical 
 Geography of the Holy Land, Sec. II. p. 70. 
 
 199 
 
200 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 MiZRACH. Mizrach meant the rising, i. e., of the son.^ 
 Kedem meant before. 
 
 It was indiiFerent whether Kedem or Mizrach was 
 used, when direction merely was meant. In other 
 cases, there was a difference in their expression of their 
 common idea. The more poetical and imaginative 
 Mizrach had the wider meaning. Each carried the 
 eye in an easterly direction ; but Mizrach farther than 
 Kedem ; as in these sentences, where they are used to- 
 gether : "on the east side eastwards,"^ "eastwards to- 
 wards the sun-rising." Mizrach is used when the East 
 is the antithesis of the West, as in this line, " as far 
 as the East is from the West ;"^ or of any other quar- 
 ter of the globe ; or where it is intended to make the 
 impression of distance strong.* But when the four quar- 
 ters of the globe are designated, Kedem, the more def- 
 inite of the two words, is used; as in this sentence: 
 "Thou shalt spread abroad to the West and to the East, 
 and to the North and to the South." ^ 
 
 ^ This is sometimes joined with it. — Deut. iv. 41. 47; 
 Jud. xi. 18 ; Is. xli. 25. 
 
 ^ Ex. xxvii. 13 ; Josh. xix. 12. 
 
 ^ Ps. ciii. 12 ; Ps. 1. 1. ; cxiii. 3 ; Josh. xi. 3 ; Zach. viii. 7. 
 
 ^ Dan. viii. 9; xi. 44; Amos viii. 12; Ps. cvii. 3; Is. 
 xliii. 5. 
 
 ^ Gen. xxviii. 14, and in Gen. xiii. 14 ; Job xxiii. 8, 9 ; 
 Ezek. xlvii. 17, 18, 19, 20. See, in Smith's Dictionary of 
 the !BIble, the admirable Article on the East, whose value is 
 out of all proportion to its brevity, by W. L. Bevau, the first 
 to note the distinction between the two forms of Anatole in 
 Matthew ii., and their relations to the two Hebrew Avords 
 Mizrach and Kedem. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 201 
 
 Each has, at times, a geographical sense ; Mizrach 
 rarely, Kedem frequently. This sense corresponds to 
 their respective compass. Thus, Mizrach, used with a 
 geographical significance, twice denotes Persia ; ^ while 
 Kedem never crosses the eastern line of the Plain of 
 the Euphrates and the Tigris. Usually the geograph- 
 ical sense of Mizrach was not definite in itself, but from 
 the context. Kedem, as has been shown in Chapter 
 II., though its application differed in diflPerent ages, was 
 used as a geographical name, whose well-established and 
 well-defined meaning was clear and sure in itself. 
 
 After the Captivity, the Jews of Palestine spoke as 
 their native tongue a local dialect of that wide-spread 
 Shemitic language known as the Syro-Chaldaic, or the 
 Aramean, — a language closely allied to the Hebrew. 
 At the Christian era, they also spoke an Oriental and 
 Hebraized dialect of the Greek language. The correct- 
 ness of these two propositions is here assumed without 
 argument, save the remark that there is evidence of the 
 latter in the following narrative, taken from the twenty- 
 first chapter of the Acts of the Apostles : — 
 
 "The Jews which were of Asia, when they saw Paul 
 in the Temple, stirred up all the people, and laid 
 hands on him, crying out, Men of Israel, help. This 
 is the man that teacheth all men everywhere against the 
 people, and the law, and this place. . . . And all the 
 city was moved ^ and the people ran together : and 
 they took Paul, and drew him out of the Temple. And 
 forthwith the doors were shut. And as they went about 
 
 1 Isa. xli. 2: xlvi. 11. 
 
202 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 to kill him, tidings came unto the cliief captain of the 
 band, that all Jerusalem was in an uproar. Who im- 
 mediately took soldiers and centurions, and ran down 
 unto them ; and when they saw the chief captain and 
 the soldiers, they left beating of Paul. Then the chief 
 captain came near, and took him, and commanded him 
 to be bound with two chains, and demanded who he 
 was, and what he had done. And some cried one 
 thing, some another among the multitude; and when 
 he could not know the certainty for the tumult, he com- 
 manded him to be carried into the castle. And when 
 he came upon the stairs, so it was, that he was borne 
 of the soldiers for the violence of the people. For the 
 rnultitude of the people followed after, crying, away 
 with him." 
 
 In this graphic picture, it is seen that the whole city 
 was drawn together, and not merely the Greek-speaking 
 Jews of Asia, who at the first ^^ stirred up all the 
 people.''^ Paul then besought of the captain of the 
 guard that he might speak to them. "And when he 
 had given him license, Paul stood on the stairs and 
 beckoned with the hand unto the people. And when 
 there was made a great silence, he spake unto them in 
 the Hebrew tongue, saying, Men, brethren, and fathers, 
 hear ye my defence which I make now unto you." 
 
 This note of the lano^uao^e that he chose to use makes 
 it sure that he had the choice of another language, which 
 the people would have understood, and were accustomed 
 to hear. It is clear that this is so, even without the 
 remark which St. Luke interposes between these words 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 203 
 
 and the speech that followed, — "and when they heard 
 that he spoke in the Hebrew tongue to them, they kept 
 the more silence." St. Paul here showed the same 
 address as when he spake on Mars' Hill to the men of 
 Athens ; and somewhat conciliated the people because 
 he appealed to their national feelings by speaking to 
 them in their native tongue, and not in the Greek, 
 which he might have used. 
 
 As these two languages had then for a long time 
 been in common use among the Jews of Palestine, their 
 flexible Greek dialect must have been somewhat modi- 
 fied by their more rigid native dialect ; and there is 
 this direct evidence that the word Anatole did undergo 
 some change of form in the local Greek of Palestine. In 
 classical Greek, as used for the East, it is in the plural, 
 and without the article, but in the Greek of Josephus 
 it is to be found in the singular and with the article.^ 
 This fact will hereafter serve another important pur- 
 pose ; here, it is used only as proof that Anatole was 
 somewhat altered, as to its form, in Palestinian Greek. 
 For Josephus prided himself on his Greek, and so it is 
 clear that in his departures, as to this word, from clas- 
 sical usage, he unwittingly followed the usage of the 
 
 ^ Antiq. I. i. 3. nqbg jr^v dcvazoXr^v God planted a Paradise in 
 the East. De Bell. Jud. H. x. 2 ; III. iii. 3 ; V. iv. 2., 
 xii. 2. In these places it does not have the article. He 
 uses it in the singular with the article. Antiq. VIII. iii. 2, 
 6 ; nod; irjv dvccjoXtjv, Proem De Bell. Jud. II. xvi. 4 ; lY. 
 X. V ; yi. vi. 1. He also used it in the plural, both without 
 the article and wiih it. Antiq. V, i, 22 ; VIII. v. 3. 
 
204 THE EAST AND THE FAK EAST. 
 
 Greek he was accustomed to speak as a Jew of Pal- 
 estine. 
 
 It is so natural, that it may almost, or quite, be taken 
 for certain, that the native dialect of the Hebrews con- 
 formed to itself some of the more common descriptive 
 terms in the flexible Greek dialect, when each had been 
 spoken for some considerable time by that people ; and 
 it is so reasonable to suppose that the Hebrew terms 
 Mizrach and Kedcm thus came to have equivalents in 
 Palestinian colloquial Greek, that a very little direct 
 evidence w^ould establish it as a fact.^ The usas^e of 
 St. Matthew is such evidence. For this theory clearly 
 and satisfactorily explains his usage, and the meanings 
 given to his terms, in conformity with it, are upheld by 
 such a variety of historical and geographical facts, and 
 by such general considerations, all harmonizing in one 
 result, that there is no reason to doubt that thus his 
 terms are correctly interpreted. 
 
 It is true that no trace of his usage is to be found in 
 the Septuagint. But should it be looked for there? 
 The scholars, who made this translation of the Hebrew 
 
 ^ As to the presence in the Aramean language, as spoken 
 by the Jews in Palestine, of terms substantially like those of 
 the Hebrew, — which is all that the argument requires, — it 
 may be said, both were such terms that this could hardly 
 have been otherwise ; and Kedem as a proper name would 
 certainly keep some place when the kindred Aramean was 
 substituted for the Hebrew. The Hebrew was a cultivated 
 dialect of the Aramean, the original language. Now, Miz- 
 rach and Kedem are found in the very oldest Hebrew, in 
 the familiar converse of the Patriarchs. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 205 
 
 Bible, conformed its Greek, so far so they well could, 
 to classical usage. They do not attempt to give exact 
 equivalents for Mizrach and Kedem. They do not try 
 to discriminate between them. They render both by 
 the plural of Aiiatole without the article. Their trans- 
 lation was made long before the time of St. Matthew's 
 Gospel. It was made outside of Palestine ; and it is 
 not probable that the Greek spoken by the LXX. was 
 much, if any, modified by a Hebrew dialect spoken at the 
 same time with it ; ^ while the explanation of the two 
 forms of Anatole in St. Matthew is based upon the 
 facts that for a long time two dialects had been spoken 
 by the Jew^s in Palestine, and that his usage was local 
 and colloquial. 
 
 It may be inquired, whether the true answer to the 
 earnestly-debated question, Did St. Matthew write 
 his Gospel in Aramean or in Greek ? together with that 
 of the questions connected with it, would confirm or 
 invalidate the opinion here maintained ? However that 
 problem may be settled, its decision would not affect it 
 much, if at all. That question has usually been dis- 
 cussed as if the supposition must be, that he wrote it 
 only in one language. But he may have composed his 
 Gospel in one of the two dialects which he spake, and 
 then have turned it into the other ; have first w^ritten 
 it in his native tongue, and then have re-written it in 
 
 ^ It is worthy of note in this connection, that Philo- 
 Judseus, one of the most learned of the Alexandrian Jews, 
 of the first century, seems to have been ignorant of the 
 Hebrew lan^ua^e. 
 
206 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 that Greek with which he and his countrymen were so 
 fiimiliar. This he could easily and quickly have done, 
 as the manuscript is so brief; and it would seem that he 
 could hardly have done otherwise. By this natural and 
 probable supposition various difficulties may be easily 
 solved, and all the facts in the case readily harmonized 
 into a consistent whole. If he did so, how very natural 
 it would be for him to give the equivalents in the Greek 
 dialect for the two words in his native tongue ; and he 
 would do this if he composed his Gospel in the Greek 
 only. 
 
 Against the whole argument in Chapter II. — of which 
 this Appendix is to be taken as a part — to prove that 
 in St. Matthew-, tj/ fn'a-ioh,^ the East, means Babylonia, 
 and di'ttToAwr, the Far East, means Persia, there are 
 some facts that might be alleged. 
 
 1. No parallel usage is to be found in the whole 
 compass of the Hebraic-Greek literature from the time 
 of the close of the Canon of the Old Testament to that 
 of the final ruin of the Jewish nation, about fifty years 
 after the Fall of Jerusalem, in the reign of the Emperor 
 Adrian (A. D. 120), when the Jews were utterly 
 driven out of Judea.^ 
 
 Before attempting to reply to the argument embodied 
 in this statement, it may be well to restate the propo- 
 sition against which it may be alleged, viz. : That in 
 his Gospel, St. Matthew used the same local, popular 
 
 ^ See Translation of Miinter's Jewish TFar, by W. W. 
 Turner, in the Bibliotheca Sacra, No. III., 1843. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 207 
 
 names for Babylonia and Persia that he would have used 
 in common conversation ; and to call to mind that with 
 other evidence for this proposition, there were these 
 facts, that he was an unlettered man, and wrote prima- 
 rily and peculiarly for his countrymen.^ 
 
 The argument before stated, as one that might be 
 brought against this proposition, has much of seeming 
 force, but there are several considerations, some of 
 which singly, and certainly all of them collectively, 
 seem to be a sufficient answer to it. First. The veri- 
 fication and illustration from general miscellaneous 
 literature of any historical or geographical phrase is 
 quite a thing of chance. That it is possible to trace so 
 clearly and fully in the literature of the Hebrews the 
 use of the term, the East, with its different meanings, 
 in different circumstances and times, is remarkable. 
 It is a fair illustration of the wonderful clearness with 
 which the whole life of the Hebrews of old, their man- 
 ners, customs, modes of speech and forms of thought, 
 their country and themselves, are mirrored in their 
 Scripture — a minuteness, a fulness, a faithfulness of 
 national self-portraiture, that makes their literature such 
 
 ^ It would strengthen the argument that follows, here to 
 add — in Judea : aud, from an inquiry made as to the 
 date, the plan of his Gospel, and the circumstances in which 
 it was written, it seems to me that there are very strong rea- 
 sons to think that it would thus more exactly state the fact. 
 But to draw out the evidence of tliis would lead far awav, 
 and the statement made in the text, the correctness of which 
 will be generally conceded, so far suffices for my purpose, 
 that this may be dispensed with. 
 
208 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 as it should be, since it is that of the people and the 
 land that are the centre of all human memory. 
 
 Second. The clear and thorous^h understandins^ of the 
 position, against which this argument may be alleged, 
 goes far to answer it. For the usage in question is not 
 that of a man of the schools, writing in the artificial 
 style of rhetoricians, but of a man of the people, who 
 in this case chose to use local and colloquial terms, 
 idioms of the popular speech. If so, the probability is 
 strong indeed that general literature will not illustrate 
 and verify his usage and meaning. Thus, in this 
 country, some years since, a series of political letters 
 were published in a volume called "Letters from Down 
 East." All understood by this phrase, the State of 
 Maine ; but if, some thousands of years hence, this book, 
 by some strange chance, shall have survived the mu- 
 tations of states and of language, it is quite possible that 
 all the learned geographies and histories of this time 
 and nation, then extant, might then be searched in vain 
 to find out what was meant by a phrase now so familiar 
 to the lips of a part of our people, and through them 
 known to the whole. 
 
 Third. The literature referred to, as now extant, is 
 by no means large. It may be said to consist of the 
 Apocrypha, the New Testament, the writings of Philo 
 and Josephus, and perhaps some small part of the 
 Apocryphal Gosj^els.^ Now, surely, it would not be 
 
 ^ These would not come within the later of the termini 
 before assigned to this literature, but it is hardly certain 
 that any part of them belongs to it, and in other respects 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 209 
 
 Strange if the writino^s of a single Enfi^lish author should 
 not furnish any illustration of some peculiar English 
 phrase, yet there are English authors whose writings 
 exceed in compass the whole of this literature. More 
 than half of it is so purely of a didactic, moral, and 
 religious kind, that it must in a great measure be laid 
 out of the account. Almost all of it was written outside 
 of Palestine, so that a local Palestinian usage, even were 
 it more than a colloquial and popular expression, would 
 not be found or referred to in it, except by rarest acci- 
 dent, the merest chance. Thus, for these reasons, it is 
 not to be looked for in the writings of Philo, nor in 
 parts of the Apocrypha ascribed to Alexandrian Jews. 
 It is also to be remembered that in most of the lands in 
 which the Jews were found, St. Matthew's names for 
 Babylonia and Persia would not have been locally appro- 
 priate ; and, that a Jew of Palestine could have found, 
 in the Greek, names he might think more fitting, as 
 more generally intelligible. 
 
 In the New Testament there is but one place where to 
 look for this usage ; and that is in the enumeration by 
 St. Peter of the countries from which there were Jews 
 present in Jerusalem at the feast of Pentecost.^ Even 
 then as he was speaking to an assembly largely made 
 up of men from foreign parts, it is by no means certain 
 that he would use a local phrase, or, if he did, St. 
 Luke may have translated this into the common speech 
 
 that date is so satisfactory, that it Avould be hypercritical 
 to object to it on this account. 
 1 Acts ii. 9, 10, 11. 
 14 
 
210 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 of the world. But the Apostle's enumeration, though 
 comprehensive, is not exhaustive. He neither mentions 
 Babylonia, nor the great Jewish settlement beyond the 
 Tigris, in Adiabene, the seat of the old Assyrian king- 
 dom, to which King Agrippa said the Jews of Palestine 
 looked so earnestly for aid in their great war with Home. 
 Perhaps, this was in both cases because the fact was so 
 well known and apparent ; for he mentions some coun- 
 tries, the representatives from which must have been 
 few indeed. He names Parthians and Medes from be- 
 yond the Tigris ; Elamites from near the southern part 
 of the Country of the Two Rivers ; dwellers in Meso- 
 potamia, its northern part ; but those of its great central 
 region are not spoken of. Nor is there any mention of 
 the country of Babylonia in the New Testament, save 
 that of St. Matthew ; though the name of the City of 
 Babylon occurs in the Apocalypse, and in the First 
 Epistle of St. Peter. 
 
 The volumes of Josephus are freighted with mis- 
 cellaneous lore, but the second proposition stated above 
 almost forbids any hope of finding in them the popular, 
 colloquial phrase of St. Matthew. And more than this, 
 he could not have used it, for this decisive reason, which 
 applies with equal force to Phllo-Judaeus : In their 
 writings that have come down to us, they addressed 
 theltomayi world; and, in their time, with the Greeks 
 and the Romans the East was the name for Syria. 
 
 The conclusion, then, is, that the argument against 
 the Interpretation that has been given to St. Matthew's 
 terms, from the absence of similar usage in the Hebraic- 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 211 
 
 Greek literature referred to, is found, on examination, 
 to have little or no appreciable weight. 
 
 2. Next, let us consider the argument against this 
 interpretation, in the fact that ancient tradition makes 
 the Wise Men Arabs. In the second century, Jus- 
 tin Martyr speaks of them as from Arabia.^ Justin was 
 born at Shechem, in Samaria, which might seem to give 
 very especial weight to his opinion. But, in history, 
 language, and origin, the people of Samaria were dis- 
 tinct from the Jews of Judea and Galilee, and the 
 reasons given for St. Matthew's usage by no means 
 apply with the same force to the Samaritans.^ 
 
 1 01 ano 'JqaSiag Mayov. — Dial. cum. Tryph. See. 78, 102. 
 
 ^ Though not strictly in place here, the following note is 
 too important to be omitted. Some may think, that if the 
 explanation of St. Matthew's terms herein maintained be 
 correct, there would necessarily be evidence of this in the 
 Syriac Testament, because of the likeness of its language to 
 that of the Palestinian Jews of the first century. If so, they 
 do not clearly mark how strictly this theory is limited to the 
 Jews of Judea and Galilee. The theory is, that the usage, 
 which was coming in just before the exile, became an idiom 
 of theirs after their return from the country of their exile, in 
 consequence of all their relations with it. 
 
 Of the area of such phrases the limits sometimes are wide 
 and vague ; sometimes small and sharply defined. The use 
 of the East, for the State of Maine, with good reason so often 
 referred to, aptly illustrates this also. It is colloquial in 
 about two thirds of Massachusetts — a State somewhat 
 smaller than Palestine — and in half of New Hampshire ; 
 while in the Western parts of those states it is not common. 
 Though at first the cause of this is not very apparent, some- 
 what of geographical and historical explanation might be 
 given of it ; but the point here is the limitation only. 
 
212 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 More than tins ; — Jnstin was a Greek, the son of 
 Priscus, the grandson of Bacchius, one of a colony 
 planted in Samaria by the Emperor Yespasian ; and his 
 parentage makes it probable that he knew no language 
 but his native Greek. If so, the mere fact that he was 
 born in Samaria — it is not certain that he grew up there, 
 and he seems to have lived in Italy — hardly makes him 
 a more decisive authority as to the meaning of a local 
 phrase of Hebraic origin in the popular speech of Judean 
 and Galilean Jews, than if he had been born in Athens, 
 or in Ephesus, where he held his Dialogue with 
 Trypho. 
 
 The Jew who furnished Celsus, in the second cen- 
 tury, with some of his arguments against Christianity, 
 calls the Wise Men, Chaldeans. The Apocryphal Gos- 
 pel of the Infancy speaks of them as foretold by Zo- 
 roaster.^ These facts are, in themselves, of slight con- 
 sequence, though they point in the right direction ; and 
 are mentioned here only as indications that from a 
 
 ^ Evangelium Infantias, Chap. YII. Et factum cum natus 
 esset Dominus Jesus Bethlehemi urbe Judejc, tempore Hero- 
 dis Regis ; ecce, magi veuerunt ex Oriente Hierosolymas, 
 quemadmodum praedixerat Zoradaseht. And it came to 
 pass when the Lord Jesus was born at Bethlehem, a city of 
 Judea, in the time of Herod the King, Magi came from the 
 East to Jerusalem according to tlie prophecy of Zoradasclit 
 (Zoroaster). See Jones on the Canon, Oxford, 1718, vol. 
 ii. p. 172. The date of this Apocryphal Gospel is very 
 uncertain. Some parts of it may be as old as the second 
 century, others are thought to be interpolations of a much 
 later date. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 213 
 
 very early period there was that uncertainty as to what 
 St. Matthew meant, which might well have arisen from 
 his use of a local idiom, whose significance was clear 
 and exact only to the Jews of Palestine, — an uncer- 
 tainty easily accounted for by the fact that with the Fall 
 of Jerusalem there began to open a wide and deep gulf 
 of separation, dividing both Christians and Jews from 
 the Holy Land. 
 
 Some of the Fathers — TertulHan, Cyprian, Hilary, 
 
 Epiphanius — thought, as Justin did, that the Wise 
 
 Men were Arabians. But in this case, their authority 
 
 is fairly counterpoised, and more, by the higher authority 
 
 and very significant language of Chrysostom ; who, in 
 
 his comment on Matthew ii., though he could not have 
 
 been ignorant of this tradition, again and again assumes 
 
 the fact that the Wise Men were Persians, and as if it 
 
 were a thing certain beyond all doubt ; as when he says, 
 
 "The Jews hear first from the language of Persia, what 
 
 they would not hear from their own prophets ; " and 
 
 again, "Wherefore this double flight? that of the Wise 
 
 Men to Persia? that of the Child to Egypt?" 
 
 The former opinion may have arisen from the old use, 
 so frequent in the Hebrew Scriptures, of the name, the 
 East, for the Desert. This usage, though obsolete in 
 St. Matthew's time, was quite Ukely to mislead men, 
 not natives of Palestine, and deeply wise, rather than 
 critically learned, in the Scriptures. It might have 
 originated, in those uncritical ages, even from the gifts 
 of the Magi, as they were all products of Arabia. But 
 they were not exclusively such ; and they were all port- 
 
214 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 able articles of merchandise. Gold was a common gift, 
 and frankincense was much used in Persia. "Arabia 
 was required to furnish annually to the Persian crown 
 a thousand talents weight of frankincense ; and there 
 is reason to believe that this rare spice was largely 
 employed about the Court, since the walls of Persepo- 
 lis have several representations of censers, which are 
 sometimes carried in the hand of an attendant, w^iile 
 sometimes they stand on the ground immediately in 
 front of the king."^ Without a present, no Asiatic 
 king, no satrap, no sheik even, is approached. Those 
 gifts the Magi brought were such as any persons might 
 have brought who sought kingly audience ; and though 
 they may point a conjecture, they determine nothing as 
 to the country of the Wise Men. 
 
 As Arabia was adjacent to Judea, this opinion may 
 seem to have some countenance, from the fact, that to 
 many the words of St. Matthew have seemed to imply 
 that the Wise Men came very soon after the Nativity. 
 Whether they do imply it, is very questionable. But, 
 however this may be, the date of the M3'stery of the 
 Incarnation, and of the outshining of the Star, may 
 have been that of the Annunciation. 
 
 It may be thought, that both of the families of Abra- 
 ham, the children of Ishmael as well as the children of 
 Jacob, would have paid early homage to his Son ; but 
 while this w^orld-embracing symbolism of the worship of 
 the Child thus shrinks into a family significance, it seems 
 
 ^ Rawlinson's Five Great Monarchies, Vol. IV. chap. iii. 
 page 1G4. 
 
THE EAST A^'D THE FAR EAST. 215 
 
 inconsistent with the laws of the Kingdom of Grace, that 
 this homage should have been paid by degenerate Arabs, 
 who had departed farther from the Truth than some not 
 of the blood of Abraham. 
 
 " The Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the 
 brightness of thy rising. . . . All they from Sheba shall 
 come, thev shall brinof "fold and incense."^ "The kinora 
 of Sheba and Seba shall offer gifts. . . . And he shall 
 live, and to him shall be given of the gold of Sheba." 
 Some of the Fathers thought that these prophecies fore- 
 told the Wise Men. If this were so, they must have 
 been Arabians. Now, in a certain sense, to apply these 
 prophecies to the Wise Men may be right. Men of 
 high rank they w^ere — forerunners and prophetic types 
 of kings to come after them ; in them the prophecy 
 " kings shall come," began to have its germinant fulfil- 
 ling ; and the words " he shall live " may be a prophetic 
 allusion to Herod's attempt to murder Jesus, as well as 
 to his resurrection from the dead ; but the Wise Men 
 were not kings ; and there is one decisive reason why 
 they could not have been those who were to come from 
 Sheba w^ith gold and incense, for in this very Gospel of 
 St. Matthew our Lord speaks of Sheba as the South, '^ 
 and his Evangelist says, the Wise Men \yqyq, from the 
 Far East. 
 
 3. From the very old opinion that the Wise Men 
 were Arabians, let us now turn to a very new notion, 
 unknown to all antiquity — that the word in the second 
 and ninth verses rendered the East, has there no local 
 
 ^ Isaiah Ix. 3, 6 ; Psalm Ixxii. 10, 15. ^ Matt. xii. 42. 
 
216 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 significance whatever, and means the rising. " Where 
 is He that is born, for we have seen His Star in its 
 rising ? " 
 
 I premise its examination by saying, that if its cor- 
 rectness could be conceded, the argument in Chapter 
 First of this book, proving that the Wise jNIen were 
 Persians, would remain just as before. Its demonstra- 
 tion of that fact is not touched at all by this inter- 
 pretation. 
 
 But its correctness, or even its plausibility, cannot 
 be conceded. It were to be wished, that those who in- 
 vented it had carefully considered and plainly told what 
 this strange rendering means. They may suppose some 
 astronomical significance in the term, as the rising of a 
 planet or of a constellation before the sun, was a nota- 
 ble fact in the ancient science of the stars. If such were 
 the meaning, then there must have been a star known 
 to these Persians as the Star of the King of the Jews ; 
 and, some reason why an especial significance attached 
 to its heliacal rising in that year : either of which con- 
 sequences, if this be the notion, are suflftcient to dis- 
 credit it. 
 
 It is more probable to suppose that they would have 
 the Star's " rising " taken as equivalent to its outshining. 
 Against this there are several reasons. 
 
 First. If such be the meaning of the Greek, the 
 way it is expressed is awkward and odd. 
 
 Second. It has been the concurring opinion of all 
 Christian ages that the words of the Wise Men express 
 a sudden outshininoj of the Star, and this while the 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 217 
 
 term Anatole, as used by them, has always been 
 taken as having a local significance. In the novel 
 sense sought to be fixed upon it, the word, then, is 
 superfluous ; and if so, it is the only superfluous word 
 in St. Matthew. 
 
 Third. If it means the rising, "we should expect 
 to find atiov, if not here," that is, in verse second, *'* cer- 
 tainly in verse ninth." — Alford. 
 
 Fourth. Because the antithesis between the East 
 and the place where the Child was born, "obviously 
 bring out a local difference." — Meyer. 
 
 Fifth. Because this rendering "is in opposition to 
 the apparently unanimous opinion of the Vulgate, Syriac, 
 Coptic, and other ancient versions." — Bishop Ellicott, 
 Life of Christ, p. 79, n. If it be said, the theory 
 that the word in question was a local name for Baby- 
 lonia is also opposed to the ancient versions, it is to be 
 said, in reply, the cases are neither the same, nor simi- 
 lar. The strange rendering is diverse from the old, 
 and cannot be harmonized with it. In all the old ver- 
 sions, some locality is denoted by their literal render- 
 ing of the phrase, and the interpretation that marks a 
 difference in the form of A'iiatole the second time it is 
 used, unexpressed in those ver^ions, gives it, in that 
 case, no sense radically different from that of the ver- 
 sions, or from its previous use, but only one that is 
 more definite. 
 
 Sixth. This strans^e renderinor seems to have come 
 wholly from the usage as to this term in classical Greek ; 
 referring to which, it is said, "the phrase, in the 
 
218 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 East, would require the plural." — Lange. This is the 
 sole argument in its favor, and it seems a strong one 
 until it is found that as to this term the usage in the 
 Hebraized Greek dialect of Palestine was different from 
 that of classical Greek. The word repeatedly occurs in 
 the singular, with a local sense, in the Hebraized Greek 
 of Josephus. His usage effectually disposes of this 
 allegation, changing it from an argument into an erro- 
 neous assertion. This rendering is in fact a rash, 
 unwise innovation, with nothing to commend or de- 
 fend it. 
 
 In conclusion. If the interpretation herein main- 
 tained be rejected, there is no interpretation oi Anatole, 
 as found in the second and in the ninth verses ; that is, 
 none of the difference in the significance of the word 
 which the Evangelist indicates by there changing its 
 form. Each of the two forms points in the same 
 direction, and to some region eastward of Palestine. 
 The English, Latin, and other versions, express some- 
 what of this sameness of meaning by rendering each in 
 the same way, that is, as if the word had the same form 
 in each place ; and thus do not interpret the difference 
 between its two forms at all. The interpretation herein 
 set forth expresses their sameness and difference, gives 
 to each an exact meaning, and explains the change in the 
 form, and its significance. If it be rejected, then, of 
 that which is characteristic of the form in the second 
 and ninth verses, of its peculiar, especial meaning, there 
 is no interpretation ; there it stands as inexplicable as 
 the words on the palace-wall to Belshazzar. 
 
THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 219 
 
 It may be said, it is a solitary instance of such an 
 idiom ; but what does that really amount to, in this 
 case, where we are as sure of the meaning as if there 
 were twenty other examples of it. This may be illus- 
 trated by Genesis xiii. 1, where it is said, "Abraham 
 went up out of Egypt into the South," which seems 
 very much like saying, he went up out of the South 
 into the South. As he was journeying northwards, 
 some might conjecture that "the South" should be 
 erased, and the North inserted in its stead. Others 
 mioht search throuo^h the Hebrew Lexicon for a word 
 that would reconcile the seeming contradiction, and 
 whose letters are so nearly like those of the word for 
 the South, that a careless copyist might have written 
 one for the other — and what other critical devices 
 might be thought of, it were hard to tell. And so, 
 when the geography of Palestine was less minutely 
 known than now, the matter must have rested. But 
 when it is known that at the foot of the hill-country of 
 Judea, between it and the desert, there is a strip of level 
 and fertile land which is good pasture for flocks and 
 herds when the uplands are brown and dry, it is at 
 once probable that the herdsmen, whose homes were on 
 the northern hills above it, gave to this plain the name 
 of the South. Then it would be called so though ap- 
 proached from the opposite quarter ; and by this natural 
 hypothesis the usage is so well explained, that it is the 
 accepted interpretation of it, and would be, were there 
 no other verse in Hebrew Scripture to confirm it. 
 
 Why not accept a similar course of reasoning as to 
 
220 THE EAST AND THE FAR EAST. 
 
 St. ]\Iatthew's phrases, which undoubtedly have some 
 geographical sense, even though his usage stood alone? 
 But it does not really stand alone. It does so, in the 
 very scanty remains of Palestinian, Hebraic Greek, 
 but it is a usage vy^hose main features all appear in the 
 Hebrew Scriptures — in the writings of Isaiah, of 
 Ezekiel, and in the Book of the Kings. 
 
PERSIAN AND HEBREW RELIGIONS. 221 
 
 II, 
 
 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN AND THE HEBREW 
 RELIGIONS. 
 
 The knowledge of the truth revealed at the begin- 
 ning, and thence onward to the time when the family 
 of the Patriarch Noah was the Human Race, was saved 
 in one nation from its degeneracy in every other, by 
 an inspiration through which that Truth was preserved 
 without corruption. All other nations tried to do this, 
 but made the Word of God of none effect throug^h vain 
 traditions. 
 
 These human trials prove the human need ; these 
 human failures, the divine success. Had not God, with 
 one people, thus kept pure the knowledge of His Truth, 
 it would not have continued free from error ; for else- 
 where it did not. Had He not revealed His guidance 
 of this people, it could not have been clearly known. 
 In the other ancient nations, error and sin hide His 
 Truth and His Grace; in some nations less, in others 
 more ; with all so much, that the history of their Reli- 
 gion can only be imperfectly written ; nor would this 
 have been otherwise, had the most ample material for 
 it, of a merely human kind, survived. 
 
222 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 The Religion of the Hebrews was holy : they them- 
 selves were so unholy, that it might be said, their 
 religion never was their religion. With histories of 
 them such as those of other nations are, it would not be 
 possible to do justice to their religion ; nor would their 
 religion, if thus known, present the contrast it does to 
 those of other ancient nations — thoughts that might be 
 expanded into an argument for the Inspiration of their 
 Sacred Books. 
 
 The other nations went more on their own way. 
 Some were, at times, recalled towards the Lord; and 
 the illumination of His nearer presence, as in the earlier, 
 better days of the virtue of Rome, was followed by an 
 outshining of civilization, sooner or later darkening, as 
 again they went farther from the Light of the World. 
 Some were held by Him stationary on the same plane, 
 — as the Chinese, — or were suffered to sink from it by 
 scarcely percej^tible degradation. Others were left to 
 wander farther and farther from the eastern morning 
 light, until the moral and spiritual distinctions between 
 them are lost in the undistinguishing darkness of bar- 
 barism. 
 
 These things seem to have been permitted, that, as 
 the individual learns by his errors what he would learn 
 in no other way, so a warning experience might be 
 wrought into the being of the human race. It seems 
 a part of the divine plan for the Redemption of Man, 
 to suffer many forms of departure from God, that the 
 nations may learn that each aberration from Him is an 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIONS. 223 
 
 advance towards ruin. This seems to be the continuinsr 
 history of man, which, changing its form, keeps its 
 spirit, as heathenism changes to what is called Chris- 
 tianity. Yet, while He " turneth man to destruction," 
 by giving him up to his own will, God ever saith, with 
 even greater power of persuasion, "Keturn, ye children 
 of men ! " 
 
 It is written, The wrath of man shall praise Him, 
 and the remainder He will restrain. This divine suffer- 
 ance and restraint of Evil are parts of one plan, whose 
 relations to each other are none the less certain, because 
 it is impossible fully to learn how they unite in one 
 result. If, then, the error that has usurped the place 
 of Truth in the religions of men has been the occasion 
 of good, much more must good have abounded from 
 that indestructible and undestroyed Truth in them, 
 which, in the beginning, was the gift, and afterwards 
 the medium, of the mercy of God ; — that Truth which, 
 quickening the moral sense, and thus giving for a time 
 a purity to the intellect, and a nobleness of purpose, 
 was the hidden but potent cause of civilizations of old, 
 such as that of Greece, from which ennobling influences 
 still continue. 
 
 In trying to learn something of the religions of the 
 world, the Bible aids us by revealing that the mercy of 
 the Lord is over all His w^orks ; that He made of one 
 blood all the nations of men, and determined the bounds 
 of their habitation, that they should seek the Lord ; 
 and that in every nation, whosoever feared God, and 
 
224 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 worked righteousness, was accepted with Him ; through 
 its outline of the early history of mankind, and through 
 allusions to peoples other than the Hebrew : though, as 
 to these, little is told ; for the Word never speaks to 
 gratify the pride of the human intellect. 
 
 All preceding antiquity has been very much hidden 
 by classical antiquity, as more distant are hidden by 
 nearer mountains. This ill-proportioned view of anti- 
 quity, which was practically restricted to Italy and 
 Greece, is opening into a larger and wiser vision ; and 
 this is well ; for classical antiquit}^ is of modern date 
 compared with primeval antiquity, and the reminis- 
 cences of revealed truth with the Komans and the 
 Greeks were foint and few, compared with those of 
 older Eastern nations. 
 
 In the primeval revelation, and so in revelation even 
 when complete, there are only a few great truths, a few 
 great facts, a few precepts. All the Law and the 
 Prophets are in the two commands, "Thou shalt love 
 the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and thy neighbor 
 as thyself." Sublime truths ! holy precepts ! — precepts 
 of endless adaptations, and the germs of whole codes 
 of customs and laws ; truths of endless self-revealing, 
 yet in number few. Were thought more turned to 
 the presence of these in the religion of the classic 
 nations, and their origin and preservation more intel- 
 ligently referred to the grace of the Lord, more of the 
 affinity of all Truth would be discerned, through a 
 clearer perception of its community of Divine Origin. 
 
 But in Asia, rather than in Europe, the truest idea 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIOXS. 225 
 
 of the religion of man is attainable. It is there history 
 most fully bears witness to the fact revealed — that God 
 gave to the whole human family, in its beginning, the 
 heritage of the Truth. 
 
 Freed from their accretions of error, all the ancient 
 religions are thus far the same. In them all are these 
 three elements : Truth Revealed, Truth discerned by 
 the Moral Reason, and the Grace of the Lord. To 
 understand something of the Relations of the various 
 forms of Religion to each other, and to Christianity, 
 is pre-requisite to any clear idea of the history of the 
 Redemption of man — that great purpose of God, the 
 central truth of all history, and without which there 
 could be no history. I propose to consider that Rela- 
 tion between the Persian and the Hebrew Relioion, susf- 
 gested by the Pilgrimage of Magi to Jerusalem. 
 
 As to this Relation, there have been three conjectures : 
 first, that Zoroaster was taught by Hebrew Prophets ; 
 second, that several Leading Ideas of the Religion 
 of the Hebrews, which have since become Christian 
 doctrines, had their origin with the Persians ; third, 
 that neither religion was in any way affected by the 
 other. 
 
 Dr. Hyde, appointed Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, 
 in 1697, maintained, with learning and zeal, the an- 
 tiquity and purity of the Persian Religion ; but in his 
 time, the means for investigating the history of Zoro- 
 aster were inadequate ; and he fell into the error of 
 giving some credence to the fable, that he w^as a servant 
 of one of the Hebrew Prophets, He was exposed to 
 15 
 
226 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 this error, because he fixed the time of Zoroaster in the 
 reign of Darius, B.C. 521-486, — the fourth Persian 
 monarch, the same against whose Generals the Athe- 
 nians fought at Marathon. 
 
 In 1770, Anquetil Du Perron published a translation 
 of the Zenda vesta, made from manuscripts found by 
 him in India. His brilliant discovery of these threw 
 new light upon the Zoroastrian religion ; but so great 
 was the difficulty of accurately and thoroughly trans- 
 lating its old-time documents, that not until within a 
 very few years can this be said to have been accom- 
 plished. Dr. Martin Haug, who, following Du Perron's 
 track, went out to India, seeking the aid of the Parsees 
 in the study of their religion, in 1862 so far completed 
 the zealous inquiries began by other scholars, that the 
 facts as to the Zoroastrian religion are probably, in the 
 main, as definitely ascertained now as they ever will 
 be ; and it only remains to determine its true signifi- 
 cance and relation to other religions of the world. 
 
 Dr. Hyde, like some other scholars since his time, 
 was misled as to the Age of Zoroaster by some of the 
 Greek writers, who confounded the name of Darius 
 Hystaspes with that of a king or chief of a different 
 epoch, who was the friend of Zoroaster. The precise 
 date of this far earlier King, Yistaspa, cannot be ascer- 
 tained ; but it must have been before the conquest of all 
 Iran by the Assyrians, which was not far from twelve 
 hundred years before Christ. Professor Whitney places 
 the Age of Zoroaster at least one thousand years, 
 Spiegel two thousand years, Dr. Haug not less than 
 
AND THE H]?BREW RELIGIONS. 227 
 
 a thousand, and probably more than fifteen hundred, 
 years before the Christ iau Era. 
 
 Zoroaster no more originated the religion associated 
 with his name, than Confucius did that of the Chinese, 
 or Elijah that of the Hebrews. He battled against 
 idolatrous tendencies, and confirmed the belief of his 
 people in one God. He was the Reformer, not the 
 Author of their faith. ^ He was one of a succession of 
 j^riests, who, like him, ministered before a flame of fire ; 
 and he speaks of ancient customs and words. These 
 facts come out clearly in the few words that are indis- 
 putably his; and from them, and from the age in 
 which he lived, it is certain that his religion can be 
 traced back to within a few centuries of the Flood. 
 The scene of his life was in Bactria, in the eastern part 
 of Iran ; and that he knew anything of Abraham, is in 
 the last degree improbable ; that he knew anything of 
 Moses, is incredible ; and that he was taught by one 
 of the later Hebrew Prophets, is impossible. Yet such 
 notions might be maintained with some plausibility,^ 
 so long as it was unknown that the word Zoroaster, 
 
 ^ Dr. Hang thinks the struggle " may have lasted centu- 
 ries before Zoroaster Spitama struck a death-blow at idol- 
 atry, and banished it from his native soil of Iran." 
 
 ^ Some of the Mohammedan writers report that the Magi 
 traced their books to Abraham, whom they regarded as their 
 prophet. The Parsee priests invented this fable to escape 
 persecution, as only those religions were tolerated by the 
 Mohammedans, whose sacred books connected them with 
 Jewish Prophets acknowledged by Mohammed. 
 
228 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 though thought by the Greeks to be the name of an 
 individual, was a title, like that of Pope, and denoted 
 the head of the spiritual community among the Medes 
 and Persians. 
 
 The second opinion is as much an error as the first. 
 The germs of all those religious ideas of the Hebrews, 
 which have been developed into Christian doctrines, are 
 found in their scriptures long before they knew the 
 Persians. Such little resemblance as there may be 
 between those ideas of the Hebrews and ideas of the 
 Persians, is hardly more than would naturally follow 
 from the influence of primal revelation in both nations, 
 and from the common element of the moral Reason. 
 None of those religious ideas of the Hebrew people 
 came through their acquaintance with any other people, 
 though the development of some of them may have 
 been quickened through their intercourse with other 
 nations, and especially with the Medes and the Persians. 
 This is probable ; but even of this there is no direct 
 historical evidence. 
 
 A searchino^ criticism would show that the seemingj 
 resemblance between the Hebrew and the Persian reli- 
 gions is sometimes superficial, sometimes deceptive, and 
 sometimes illusive. Thus the Monotheism which, in 
 a large and charitable construction of it, must be as- 
 cribed to the religion of the Persians, in its creed is 
 marred by the prime error of dividing the work of 
 creation between Ahriman and Ormazd ; and subse- 
 quently by the worship of Mithra, the Sun, which is 
 recognized in inscriptions of their PontiflT Kings, and 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIONS. 229 
 
 even in the Zendavesta itself, in its later, degenerate 
 teachings. The resemblance between the Hebrew and 
 the Persian idea of the Evil Spirit is deceptive. They 
 were radically different. The plausible conjecture, 
 acceded to by Milman, — that the figurative language 
 of the New Testament referring to the element Light, 
 is borrowed from the Zoroastrian religion, — is illusive. 
 The root of this instructive and remarkable imagery 
 is in the sublime chapter that opens the revelation of 
 God. There, Light is the medium through which the 
 glory of God is revealed in the work of Creation. It is 
 the life-o^ivino^ and form-Mvino- element. Accordino^ to 
 the Hebrew Scriptures, this element is in nature what 
 it is in the Temple — the Shekinah of the Divine Pres- 
 ence. It is the mantle of the Deity. The Almighty 
 challenges man to pierce through its mystery. Thus 
 inspiration, giving to the Hebrews of old all, and more 
 than all, the fulness of the modern thought, of one force 
 in nature,^ made this inscrutable and universal element 
 the very breath of the presence of Him in whom all 
 things live and move and have their being. This mys- 
 terious element is the symbol of the Creating Word of 
 God, who, incarnate in the form of man, is the bright- 
 ness of the Father's glory ; that which is revealed of 
 the presence and work of this element in the material 
 
 ^ See The Church and Science, or the Ancient Hebraic 
 Idea of Creation. Part II. Chap, iii., The First Cycle in 
 Creation; Chap, viii., Light representing the One Force in 
 the Inorganic World. Andover, 1860. 
 
230 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 creation, making it the most fitting image of Christ the 
 Lord in the spiritual creation. When it is said in the 
 New Testament, "In Him was Life, and the Life was 
 the Light of men," it is in a revehition which commences 
 in the very words that begin the Old, which throughout 
 pointedly refers to the record of the Creation, and bor- 
 rows this figure from it ; and all the frequent language 
 in the New Testament is conformed to this imasfe. It 
 is the recurrence of very similar language in the Old, — 
 as any reader of the Bible, with merely the aid of a 
 Concordance, can prove for himself. Does St. John 
 speak of walking in the light? Isaiah had said, "Come, 
 let us walk in the light of the Lord." Does St. James 
 speak of God as "the Father of Lights"? It was writ- 
 ten of old, " God said. Let there be light, and there was 
 light." Does St. Paul say, " God dwelleth in light un- 
 approachable " ? It was written of old, "He covereth 
 Himself with light as with a garment;" and, "He 
 dwelleth in light." Did Christ say, "I am the Light 
 of the world"? It was said of Him of old, "I will 
 give Thee for a light to the Gentiles : The people that 
 sat in darkness saw a G^reat lioht : The Lord shall be 
 thy everlasting light." 
 
 In the first frenzy of discovery in Egyptian archae- 
 ology, there was a strong disposition in some, more 
 learned than wise, to refer the origin of many of the 
 relio'ious ideas of the Hebrews, and most of their usacres, 
 to the Egyptians. Gradually this notion has faded out. 
 It may now and then revisit the glimpses of the moon, 
 when some garrulous man, or silly woman, maunders 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIONS. 231 
 
 in the tombs of Egypt ; but what the traveller's dilated 
 eyes seem to see, is the sickly ghost of an error that 
 is dead and buried in a grave deep and secure, and 
 where there are few mourners. So it will be with the 
 perverse and reckless assertion of the Persian origin of 
 any of the truths of the Christian religion. 
 
 On this subject the opinion of Dr. Haug is good 
 authority.^ He says, "The Zoroastrian religion ex- 
 hibits even a close affinity to, or rather identity with, 
 several important doctrines of the Mosaic religion and 
 Christianity, such as the personality and attributes of 
 the Devil, and the resurrection of the dead, which are 
 both ascribed to the religion of the Magi, and are really 
 to be found in the present scriptures of the Parsees. 
 It is not to be ascertained whether these doctrines were 
 borrowed by the Parsees from the Jews, or by the Jews 
 from the Parsees : very likely neither is the case, and 
 in both religions they seem to have sprung up inde- 
 pendently." ^ 
 
 ^ Bunsen, in " God in History," Book III. chap. vi. p. 292, 
 speaks of the " important discoveries of this distinguished 
 scholar." Bunsen himself says, in the same work, p. 284, 
 ** The myth invented by German scholars of the purely Per- 
 sian origin of the Hebrew traditions, belongs to the infancy 
 and nonage of research into the Book of Genesis — a mis- 
 leading hypothesis, which ought not in decency to be men- 
 tioned, at this time of day, by any scientific man." 
 
 ^ Essays, pages 2, 3. He adds : "In the Zendavesta we 
 meet with only two words Avhich may be traced to the Semitic 
 languages, neither of them referring to religions subjects. 
 In the later books of the Old Testament we find several Per- 
 
232 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 The fact is, that when the Christian mind comes to 
 the study of the monuments of the Persian religion, it 
 is at first struck with its seeming or real resemblance to 
 the Hebraic and Christian systems, and the same is the 
 case, in some measure, with other religions ; but the 
 more it compares them, the more it sees and feels their 
 difference, until nearly all feeling or sense of the like- 
 ness is wisely lost in that of the diversity. In the study 
 of the one there is an ever growing perception of the 
 errors of men ; in the other, of the wisdom of God. 
 
 The extreme of opinion in one direction is apt to 
 beget an extreme of error in an opposite direction. 
 Such may be the case with some, who, in opposition to 
 the second, hold to the last of the three opinions before 
 stated. This opinion grows out of the feeling that the 
 religion of the chosen and peculiar people could not 
 have owed anything to that of any other people ; and 
 surely, even the Persians, though not to be confounded 
 with the heathen, were not as the Israelites, "to whom 
 pertained the adoption, . . . and of whom, as concerning 
 the flesh, Christ came, who is over all, God blessed 
 forever." But as the Drama of the World unfolds in 
 accordance with the determinate counsel of God, it can 
 hardly be that He could have brought two nations, so 
 highly favored of Him, into such close relations, and 
 
 sian words, and many names ; but these have nothing to do 
 with religion. The most famous of these Persian words in 
 the Old Testament, now spread throughout the world, is the 
 word Paradise, which meant originally a park, a beautiful 
 garden fenced in." 
 
AND THE HEBllEW RELIGIONS. 233 
 
 they not have put forth upon each other more or less of 
 mutual religious influence. 
 
 The Eg}' ptian, Assyrian, Greek and Roman, oppressed 
 the people of Israel. In this they accomplished the 
 will of God, but did so unwittingly and unwillingly. 
 The Persian was the intelligent and willing servant 
 of God in saving the people of Israel from destruc- 
 tion. He broke in pieces their chains ; he restored 
 them to Jerusalem. Well might Israel sing, " When 
 the Lord turned again the captivity of Zion, we were 
 like them that dream. Then was our mouth filled 
 with laughter, and our tongue with singing. Then 
 said they among the heathen. The Lord hath done 
 great things for them." Dream-like, indeed, the sw^ift 
 transition from their slavery, in the last night of Baby- 
 lon, to the morning, when, bearing with it the golden 
 vessels of the Temple, the caravan of home-returning 
 exiles moved from the Plain of Shinar to the heights of 
 Jerusalem! If God, "for his servant Jacob's sake," 
 raising the Persians to the height of dominion, thus per- 
 mitted them to minister to Israel in things temporal, is it 
 inconceivable, that He may have ordained they should 
 also minister to Israel in things that were spiritual ? 
 
 It is an unquestioned opinion, that in one respect 
 they did. The chastening of their exile brought the 
 children of Israel nearer to their God : their restoration 
 to Zion made them grateful to Him, and the fear and 
 love thus strengthened in their souls tended to keep 
 ihem from the apostasy of other days. But this ia 
 to be attributed, in some degree, to their witness of 
 
234 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 the fact, thcat the people who had cast down the Might 
 of the Heathen, worshipped the God of Heaven. 
 
 The lesson of Persian monotheism, dominant over the 
 World, concurring with the Divine monitions of their 
 history, goes far to explain why the Hebrews, after 
 their Caj)tivity, though the living voice of prophecy was 
 dying away, were more firm in their faith than when 
 Elijah confounded the priests of Baal. 
 
 If it be conceded that the belief of the Hebrews in 
 one God was strengthened by their knowledge of the 
 Persian religion, why must the effect of that religion 
 upon them for good be restricted to this one doctrine? 
 Surely, none was greater ; and as to this very doctrine, 
 the Persian religion was darkly in error. If it be said 
 that there is no direct evidence of any influence as to 
 any other doctrine, it is equally true as to this. There 
 is a strong probability that it was so ; and there is the 
 same as to their belief in the Devil, in the Angelic 
 World, and in the Resurrection. The first fact in the 
 case is, that there was a great development of each of 
 these doctrines in the Hebrew mind, in the five hundred 
 years between the close of the Old Testament and the 
 time of the New. The question is. Did their knowledge 
 of the Persians contribute to this? 
 
 The fferra of the whole Christian doctrine is in the 
 third chapter of Genesis ; and if so, of course, of its 
 doctrine of an Evil Being, who is the Adversary of 
 man. That chapter is in sharp contrast to the spirit 
 and genius of the Persian idea of the creation of the 
 world, in which was involved his idea of the oriojin of 
 
AND THE HEBREW EELIGIOIsS. 235 
 
 evil. It follows the grandly and purely monotheistic 
 opening of the book of Genesis, where each th.ng in 
 Heaven and in Earth is the creation of one God, and 
 each and all, again and again, is pronounced good. 
 Into this good world evil enters in the gnise of a ser- 
 pent. In what follows, God will not even name the 
 Tempter. His words, at first, see.n only to and of the 
 Serpent ; and the personality of the Spirit, who through 
 this medium wrought the Fall of man, is manifest only 
 in the darkly luminous prophecy of enmity between his 
 seed and the seed of the woman, and of his future 
 destruction. Compare this with Zoroaster's conception 
 of twin Spirits -each of them eternal, each a Creator; 
 one of whom creates the good, and the other the evil, 
 of the world ; which is essentially the same heresy that, 
 in a later age, God reproved in the Persian Cyrus say- 
 in., "I am the Lord, and there is none else. I form 
 the lioht, and create darkness. I make peace, and 
 create°evil. I, the Lord, do all these things." 
 
 Or compare this chapter of Genesis with the state- 
 ment of Theopompus of Chios, B. C. 300, preserved by 
 Plutarch, that, according to the Magi, two hostile Gods 
 ruled the earth for successive periods, each of three 
 thousand years- a statement that substantially appears 
 in the "Bundehesh," an authoritative collection ot 
 Zoroastrian traditions made subsequent to A.D. 226, 
 the date of the later kingdom of the Persians, and of a 
 concurrent revival of their nationality and religion. It 
 will thus be seen, there was a sharp and clear difference 
 and opposition of ideas, as to the Evil Spirit, in the 
 
236 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 Hebrew and the Persian creeds, even from the earliest 
 to the latest hour of the Zoroastrian religion. 
 
 It may be said, if the Persian idea of the Evil Spirit 
 was so different from the Hebrew, and so great an 
 error, it could not have had an influence for good on the 
 Hebrew belief. But error is often the occasion of the 
 development of Truth ; and it is easy to see how it may 
 have been in this case. A mysterious allusion there 
 was to a Deliverer to come, in words of God, spoken 
 not to man, but in the hearing of man, in the hour of 
 his ruin, enkindling a great and sure hope, yet without 
 distinctness of form ; words of might, since spoken by 
 the Almighty, but rather to be cherished in the musing 
 and believing heart, than clear to the intellect. What- 
 ever the reason why the knowledge of a Redeemer to 
 come was veiled in the enigma of the words in which 
 it was breathed into the soul of the Father of mankind, 
 since this was so, there would have been no wisdom in 
 the bringing out niore clearly the existence of the Evil 
 Spirit, the effect of whose Tempting was an ever-present 
 evidence of his being and power. It is evidence of this, 
 that, almost everywhere throughout the primeval world, 
 there was a worship that is best accounted for by assum- 
 ing that it grew out of a perverted reminiscence, even 
 of this wisely reticent and guarded revelation — the 
 worship of the Snake, the low medium of the Dark 
 Spirit. Kor would it have become the tender mercy 
 and lovin2;-kindness of the Lord to the children of the 
 dust, to have terrified them by a revelation of all that 
 might have been made known of the power and might 
 
AND THE HEBREW KELIGIONS. 237 
 
 of the Adversary of the Human Soul, so long as the 
 Being who was to destroy him could not be made mam- . 
 fast ° But the reasons for this reserve ceased when the 
 tendency to idolatry was dead in the Hebrew mind, and 
 was dying out in many of the nations, and the hearts of 
 the pious in Israel were quickened to a strong and clear 
 belief in a spiritual Redeemer, whose coming drew n.gh. 
 In the earliest human hour, two Antagonists, whose 
 field is the world, whose prize the Human Race, are 
 darkly manifest. When in the fulness of time all that 
 was then shadowed forth, and all the truths related to 
 it, were brought to light, there were seen mighty and 
 all-pervading influences in the Human World proceed- 
 in., from beings not of flesh and blood ; and Christ the 
 Lord directing those influences of good, overrulmg those 
 of evil ; while, at the head of an opposing liost, Satan 
 contends, with ever less and less of consequence, agamst 
 Him The human history and the soul attest to these 
 facts as revealed. But alike in the limitations of the 
 knowledge of Truth, and in the guarded, gradual un- 
 folding of it, the wisdom of God is only less adorable 
 than in the making it known. Much of this glory, and 
 therefore of this darkness, was hidden of old. ihe 
 wisdom and mercy of God would not permit that the 
 dominion of the Prince of this World, of the Pnnce of 
 the Power of the Air, should be fully manifest, untd the 
 time of the manifestation of Him who came to destroy 
 the works of the Devil. 
 
 The dark eminence of the Evil Spirit, in the creed 
 of that great People with whom the relations of the 
 
238 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 Hebrews had been so providential, was well fitted, as 
 the right time approached for the full unfolding of the 
 true doctrine from its germ in the third chapter of 
 Genesis, to compel the Hebrews to search out more 
 earnestly than ever before, and to appreciate the truth, 
 as it was, in that ancient oracle. 
 
 Angels are known to the records of the Hebrew 
 religion from early time ; but there is a reticence as to 
 them, like that marked before, and, it may be, having 
 a like cause. What the Israelites had, first of all, to 
 learn for all nations, was the truth, that the Lord God 
 was one Lord. Too early a development among them 
 of the knowledo'e of the existence of malis^nant beincfs 
 not of flesh and blood, would have been followed by a 
 superstitious and idolatrous worship of them, that would 
 have come between God and his people, even more 
 fatally than that which they borrowed from the nations 
 around them. 
 
 The reserve as to the Evil Spirit may have a relation 
 to this reserve as to ans^elic beinsfs. If the orio-in and 
 much of the presence of Evil in the earth be attributed 
 to one Being, it is difficult not to clothe him with some- 
 thing like ubiquity and omnipresence, and so to make 
 of him a god — the heresy of the Persian creed. Tliere 
 is somethinor of safesruard asfainst this in the idea of a 
 
 o o o 
 
 host of evil spirits, to one of whom, as their chief, all 
 that is done by them all is attributed ; as all that was 
 done by his million of soldiers in France, in Italy, in 
 Egypt, in Spain, or Russia, is ascribed to Napoleon. 
 Thus it may have been that both of these doctrines 
 were held back, and both brought forward together. 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIONS. 239 
 
 The idea of angels, dimly conceived of by Zoro- 
 aster, was rapidly and fully developed in the Zoroastrian 
 system — perhaps, in the providence of God, as some 
 counteractive to its great central error ; and it is very 
 probable that, through the influence of that system, the 
 Hebrew idea of angelic worlds, which, however, was by 
 no means identical with the Persian, reached its fulness. 
 This idea attains almost to certainty, when, in the Vis- 
 ions of Daniel, angels appear w4th names, — though 
 these are pure Hebrew, — and with gradations of rank, 
 and the nations are under their watch and ward. 
 
 The doctrine of the Resurrection had its germ in the 
 third chapter of Genesis ; for Death to the soul and 
 the body having followed the coming of the mysterious 
 Adversary of man, life to both will assuredly follow the 
 coming of the mysterious Friend of man. This hope 
 arose in the mind of the pious Israelite, as, believing to 
 the fullest in the word and power of God, he mused on 
 His darklv-clear lanouaoe of old : and it was confirmed 
 to him by the translation of Enoch in bodily form into 
 the heavens, and by the like translation of the prophet 
 Elijah. But it was a hope that had no definiteness of 
 time or form. The Persian boldly and erroneously 
 enlarged the primeval doctrine. He first conceived of 
 equal gods ; but, happily inconsistent in error, made 
 one of them completely triumphant over the other, and 
 so rushed on to the belief in his complete victory over 
 the Grave. Little indeed he knew throus^h Whom that 
 victory w^ould be won, and how ! Still there was some- 
 thing that was right and true in his thought ; and here, 
 
240 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 as before, it is very suggestive of an influence of the 
 Persian upon the Hebrew mind, that the first clear 
 revelation of the Resurrection, although there are some 
 intimations of it in other of the Prophets, is made by 
 the Prophet Daniel. 
 
 That he taught the Persians,^ is proved by the Pil- 
 
 ^ The belief of the Persians in the Resnrrectiou was known 
 to the Greeks, B. C. 300. It is in the Zendavesta. It is 
 a logical sequence of its leading thoughts ; and there was a 
 sign of this truth in the primeval world. There seems, then, 
 no reason for referring its origin or development among 
 them to the Hebrews. Not so with their idea of the So- 
 siosh. (See page 92.) This may have had its source far 
 back in the primeval faith. But in the first brief allusion to 
 him, he is born out of the water Kacoya, and so seems a 
 spirit or god ; in the second^ he is a man. This is remark- 
 able, as the legend-forming current runs the other way. 
 Thus, in the earliest part of the Zendavesta, — which, on this 
 very account, is to be received as historical, — Zoroaster is 
 a teacher, with nothing legendary about him. Before the 
 end of the growth of the Zendavesta, he becomes almost a 
 god ; and many are the strange legends told of him by later 
 Parsees — such as. after their conversion by the Arabs, the 
 Persians told of Maliomet. A similar development would 
 be the natural one of their idea of the Sosiosh, which, as 
 first obscurely uttered, tends that way. Probably the change 
 in it was wrought by the influence of Daniel, and some slight 
 trace of a likeness to the doctrine of the Messiah thus grafted 
 into the Zendavesta. Some of the few who can decipher 
 that book think it older than the reign of Cyrus, judging 
 from the language of the Acha?meuian inscriptions. This 
 must be accepted for the present. But the Magiau Litera- 
 ture grew till Alexander's time ; and sections may have 
 been added to this book under the Achiemenian kings, though 
 
AND THE HEBEEW RELIGIONS. 241 
 
 frrimaofe of Masfi to Jerusalem. He may have learned 
 from them. If they had any reminiscences or intuitions 
 of truth that were more full and clear than they were, 
 at that time, among his own people, this would have 
 been discerned by the "man of Desires."^ His the 
 mind to understand, his the heart to appreciate, what- 
 ever there was of truth in the religion of Ormazd. 
 That religion had its origin in the primeval revelation. 
 In it there were gleams of orient light, though inter- 
 mingled with gross darkness. Veins of pure water 
 were there, though bubbling up in the wide and stag- 
 nant morass. They had no unintermitting source, no 
 channel to keep them clean and clear of the marsh, no 
 onward, purifying motion, like the River "the streams 
 whereof make glad the City of God ; " yet the Prophet's 
 wand may have called forth from the morass waters to 
 swell that River. He who saw so clearly the truth of 
 God afar off in the ages to come, may have seen it very 
 nio^h in the souls of those amonsj whom his lot was cast. 
 Such truth, accredited to him by the Divine Spirit, and 
 by it freed from all human error, he may have com- 
 mended to his own people, and have made it part of the 
 everlasting oracle of man. 
 
 the opinion above be in the main correct. After all, the idea 
 of the Sosiosh is so little like the clear, consistent Prophetic 
 prevision of the Christ, that the matter is of little importance. 
 ^ Daniel ix. 23 ; x. 11. " Thou art a man of Desires," 
 are the words of the angel to Daniel, accordiag to the Mar- 
 ginal Reading in the English Bible. So, too, the Vulgate : 
 " Vir desideriorum es." The idea seems to be — a man de- 
 sirous to know all truth. 
 
242 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 Whether hd did so or not is a question of fact, to be 
 settled, if it can be settled at all, by its appropriate 
 evidence. As to the effect of that evidence, different 
 minds may come to different conclusions ; but the no- 
 tion that it was impossible, because it v^ould derogate 
 from Christianity, comes from too narrow an idea of 
 the genesis and history of our Eeligion. 
 
 The religion that was before the Hebrews were — 
 that is our religion. Great truths and facts, such as 
 the Being and Spirituality of God ; such as His Crea- 
 tion of the Heavens and the Earth ; the unity of the 
 Human Race ; the temptation by the Evil One, and 
 the Fall of Man ; the Redeemer to come ; the institu- 
 tion of Sacrifice, with all that is implied therein ; truths 
 and facts of higher moment than the illustrations or 
 confirmations of them in the providence of God towards 
 the Hebrews, and which maybe viewed apart from 
 them ; — these truths and facts are the substance and 
 soul of our ancient religion, and all these were "before 
 Abraham was." 
 
 So, too, were many holiest men. The Priest of the 
 Most High God, the mysterious Melchizedec, to whom 
 Abraham paid tithes, was not a Hebrew ; nor was Noah, 
 who brought the records of the church across the dis- 
 severing Flood ; nor Enoch, whose translation Into the 
 Heavens intimated to the early church that the body 
 might share in the immortality of the soul; nor Abel, 
 whose sacrifice prefigured the sacrifice of the Lord ; nor 
 Adam, who held converse with GoD. 
 
 The Religion which built the first altar to the Living 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIOXS. 243 
 
 and only GoD, and offered the first sacrifice after the 
 Flood, embraced all then on the earth, and from them 
 all now on the earth have sprung. That religion every- 
 where had an ally in the conscience ; and doubtless in 
 every nation it had allies in some who listened to the 
 divine and the human oracle. Though perverted, cor-, 
 rupted, and partially forgotten, yet it may be discerned 
 as an element in the religion of all nations — in some 
 that have ceased to be, and in those that are : nowhere 
 have its traces been wholly obliterated. 
 
 The Hebrews received this universal, primeval reli- 
 gion through Abraham. Among them it was fostered by 
 rites and ceremonies that made them a peculiar people, 
 even as they were, in some periods of their history, 
 a solitary people. It was preached among them by 
 inspired prophets and teachers. The Lord himself 
 perfected this religion, which, before Abraham's day, 
 he had instituted among men. He did away with 
 all that in it was local ; made that which in it was 
 partial, complete ; established that which in it was uni- 
 versal and everlasting ; and commissioned all His peo- 
 ple everywhere to preach throughout all the world, that 
 this fulness of Truth by Him revealed was, and was to 
 be forever, the Keligion of mankind. 
 
 The Hebrews were chosen of God, as a people, to 
 keep for us the Truth that w^as of old. They were 
 chosen, that through them might be revealed the provi- 
 dence and government of the Lord in the earth, and 
 their history become a parable of instruction to all na- 
 tions through all time. The line of Abraham and the 
 
244 RELATION OF THE PERSIAN 
 
 house of David were chosen, that there might be pre- 
 pared a fiimily where the Holy Child, predicted from 
 the beginning, might grow in wisdom and stature, and 
 in favor with God and man, when unto us was born 
 the Saviour, who is Christ the Lord. 
 , The truth which the Hebrews kept for us, they 
 regarded as truth that was of old, and as truth that 
 was for all. They alone, of all the ancient nations, 
 faithfully remembered the three great, inseparable truths 
 — the Unity of God, the Unity of the World, and the 
 Unity of the Human Race. They faithfully registered 
 the chronicle of the Dispersion of the Nations. The 
 genealogy of their family was a branch of the gene- 
 alogy of the family of man. They felt themselves at 
 one with all the people of God, in all the ages be- 
 fore they were a people. The words of Moses, as his 
 thoughts ran far back of Abraham's day, and past even 
 the Flood, till they lost themselves in the Everlasting 
 Days of the Beginning, are, "Lord, thou hast been 
 our dwelling-place in all generations." 
 
 The Hebrews recognized inspiration in Job ; they 
 recognized inspiration even in Balaam. The narrow- 
 ness that would not recognize it anywhere was no part, 
 of the character of the Hebrews, and was abhorrent to 
 the spirit of their religion. The First Temple was built 
 with the friendly aid of Phoenician Tyre : at its dedica- 
 tion Solomon prayed for the stranger. The Second 
 Temple was built with Persian aid : in that Temple 
 Simeon spoke of the Lord, not only as " the glory of 
 Israel," but as "a liijht to lighten the Gentiles," and 
 
AND THE HEBREW RELIGIONS. 245 
 
 of His "salvation," as "prepared for all people." St. 
 Paul recognized an element of truth in tlie religion 
 of Athens, and made the words of one of the Poets 
 of Greece part of the Divine Oracle. St. Matthew 
 recorded the homage to the infant Redeemer, of Sages 
 from a foreign land. The Lord Himself said, He had 
 sheep not of the Hebrew fold. 
 
 Down to Abraham's day, the truth in the Bible was 
 not of Jewish origin on its human side ; it was not 
 wholly so afterwards. Job, in whose thoughts and 
 words there is not a trace of the Law given on Mount 
 Sinai, was not a Jew. 
 
 The Bible is not a Hebrew Book. The Bible is the 
 Book of Man. It is a divine record of Truth revealed 
 before Abraham's day — Truth which it pleased God to 
 preserve, through the children of Abraham, free from all 
 taint of their sins and errors, yet made more clear and 
 impressive by those sins and errors. It is no less 
 glorious, if, on its human side, this Truth be in part 
 Chaldean, or Egyptian, or Persian; while it is of no 
 consequence as to its authority, since it reaches us 
 through inspired men, free from its corruptions on other 
 lips, and pure as it breathed from on high. 
 
 THE END. 
 
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BS2423.U67 
 
 The wise men: who they were; and how 
 
 Princeton Theological Seminary-Speer Library 
 
 1 1012 00013 2516 
 
 
 DATE DUE 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 HIGHSMITH # 
 
 45230 
 
 
 Primed 
 In USA