History of the Parsis : including their manners, customs, religion and present position : with coloured and other illustrations : in two volumes

CHAP. IV.] REWARDS AND PUNISHMENTS. 197

excellent work, which no one can read without being impressed with an idea of the greatness and goodness of God, and the advantage to be gained from the practice of morality. Captain J. A. Pope has translated the work into Enelish, and, on publishing it in the year 1816,’ declared that the motives which led him to undertake its publication “arose from a strong desire to be more intimately acquainted with the principles of a morality he admired, and of the daily exercise of benevolence that sprang from those principles.” He further trusted that it “would be the means of removing many an ill-founded opinion with regard to the morality of this interesting tribe.” Zoroaster has said, and the Zend-Avesta proclaims in every page, that men are saved only by their good deeds in this world, and that every soul is punished or rewarded according to his conduct and the motives by which he was actuated in his mundane career. Nothing can be more true, nothing more compatible with the nicest sense of justice—rewards according to merit, punishments according to crime. And these, in fact, are the very objects which the revelations of Arda Viraf profess to show and prove. The description which the Parsi

} A much better translation of it, from the text prepared by Dastur Hoshangji Jamaspji of Poona, was published in 1872 by the late Dr. Haug, assisted by Dr. E. W. West, an eminent Pehlevi scholar of our time.