But that was a later inspiration. In earlier, and it may be happier,
times the duty of the good man was to strive against all evil, disorder,
uselessness, incompetence in their more simple forms. "He therefore is a
holy man," says Ormuzd in the Zend-avesta, "who has built a dwelling on
the earth, in which he maintains fire, cattle, his wife, his children,
and flocks and herds; he who makes the earth produce barley, he who
cultivates the fruits of the soil, cultivates purity; he advances the law
of Ahura Mazda as much as if he had offered a hundred sacrifices."

To reclaim the waste, to till the land, to make a corner of the earth
better than they found it, was to these men to rescue a bit of Ormuzd's
world out of the usurped dominion of Ahriman; to rescue it from the
spirit of evil and disorder for its rightful owner, the Spirit of Order
and of Good.

For they believed in an evil spirit, these old Persians. Evil was not
for them a lower form of good. With their intense sense of the
difference between right and wrong it could be nothing less than hateful;
to be attacked, exterminated, as a personal enemy, till it became to them
at last impersonate and a person.

Zarathustra, the mystery of evil, weighed heavily on them and on their
great prophet, Zoroaster--splendour of gold, as I am told his name
signifies--who lived, no man knows clearly when or clearly where, but who
lived and lives for ever, for his works follow him. He, too, tried to
solve for his people the mystery of evil; and if he did not succeed, who
has succeeded yet? Warring against Ormuzd, Ahura Mazda, was Ahriman,
Angra Mainyus, literally the being of an evil mind, the ill-conditioned
being. He was labouring perpetually to spoil the good work of Ormuzd