conquered. From the age of five to that of twenty, their lads were
instructed but in two things--to speak the truth and to shoot with the
bow. To ride was the third necessary art, introduced, according to
Xenophon, after they had descended from their mountain fastnessess to
conquer the whole East.

Their creed was simple enough. Ahura Mazda--Ormuzd, as he has been
called since--was the one eternal Creator, the source of all light and
life and good. He spake his word, and it accomplished the creation of
heaven, before the water, before the earth, before the cow, before the
tree, before the fire, before man the truthful, before the Devas and
beasts of prey, before the whole existing universe; before every good
thing created by Ahura Mazda and springing from Truth.

He needed no sacrifices of blood. He was to be worshipped only with
prayers, with offerings of the inspiring juice of the now unknown herb
Homa, and by the preservation of the sacred fire, which, understand, was
not he, but the symbol--as was light and the sun--of the good spirit--of
Ahura Mazda. They had no images of the gods, these old Persians; no
temples, no altars, so says Herodotus, and considered the use of them a
sign of folly. They were, as has been well said of them, the Puritans of
the old world. When they descended from their mountain fastnesses, they
became the iconoclasts of the old world; and the later Isaiah, out of the
depths of national shame, captivity, and exile, saw in them
brother-spirits, the chosen of the Lord, whose hero Cyrus, the Lord was
holding by His right hand, till all the foul superstitions and foul
effeminacies of the rotten Semitic peoples of the East, and even of Egypt
itself, should be crushed, though, alas! only for awhile, by men who felt
that they had a commission from the God of light and truth and purity, to
sweep out all that with the besom of destruction.