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Indifference on the part of the Parsi youth arouses the proselytizing zeal of the Christian missionaries. These thought that they could easily turn the apathy of the newly educated Parsi youth for his own religion to interest in the faith of Jesus, if they could convince him of the superiority of Christianity over his national creed. The impressionable youth once secured, they imagined, would prove a valuable asset in bringing over his enlightened coreligionists to the Christian fold. Christianity would thus easily spread downwards among the masses, they thought, if only they could capture the upper educated classes. The missionaries felt that this handful of the progressive people, who approached nearest to the Western people in their modes of living, would ultimately be easily won over to their faith. With this object in view some of them began to study the Zoroastrian scriptures first hand, during the latter part of the first half of the last century. They picked out what seemed to them to be vulnerable points in the Zoroastrian faith, and exposed them to the ridicule of the Parsi youth newly tinged with Western ideas. The community was alarmed at this aggression, the more so when a couple of converts were actually made to Christianity from this class.

Salient features of Zoroastrianism assailed by the missionaries. The religion of Zoroaster, the controversialists alleged, abounded in absurdities and incongruities. It was based on the idolatry of nature. The Parsi scholars repudiated the accusation with indignation, and said that in their reverence for the elements of nature they never worshipped fire, sun, and such other elements, but venerated the angels presiding over these noble productions of God, holding them to be his purest symbols.^[1]