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hymns was ascribed to Zoroaster himself. The prophet's work, it was said, was continued by his immediate disciples, and must have extended over a very long period after him, even though the immediate impression made by Zoroaster himself may be acknowledged to have become fainter in succeeding generations. The religion of the Younger Avesta had departed in certain respects from the religion of the Gathas, and the subsequent compositions showed signs of degeneration both in substance and style. The simple and abstract spirit of the Gathas was blurred if not lost, and the development of the later texts tended to become more complex and concrete. We breathe a different atmosphere, they declared, when we pass from the Gathic to the Later Avestan field. Nature-worship, which Zoroaster strove to supplant by a higher type of ethical religion, was shown to have been reinstated in these later texts. The masses could not be weaned from the beliefs that loomed large in their eyes, and thus, the scholars maintained, many practices abolished by Zoroaster were later resuscitated by the clergy.

Startling indeed were these new ideas that philological researches brought to the Parsis, who had been accustomed to attribute indiscriminately all Avestan compositions to Zoroaster himself and who never approached their own sacred books with a historical perspective.

Back to the Gathas was the war-cry of the new school. This critical estimate of their scripture by the Iranian scholars of the West greatly influenced the young Parsi scholars in India. They now hailed the Gathas as providing a self-sufficient religious system in themselves. They claimed to have discovered the only true mirror in which the genuine teachings of Zoroaster were reflected. The Later Avestan texts were declared to render nugatory the pristine purity. An exuberant outgrowth of dogmatic theology and ceremonial observances, they asserted, had supplanted the buoyant simplicity of the Gathic teachings, and simply represented a decline from the pure teachings of Zoroaster. The names of the Amshaspands in the Gathas were considered to be merely descriptive of the attributes of Ormazd. These attributes, they insisted, had crystallized into concrete beings, thus converting the monotheistic religion of Zoroaster into a veritable system of polytheism. Tradition, they argued, attributed to Zoroaster doctrines that he never preached. They advocated a return to the