club despatches the impious, but a place of honour at their side is
assigned to the peasant, who reclaims from the power of Angrô-mainyus the
dry and sterile fields. Among the places where the earth thrives most
joyously is reckoned that "where a worshipper of Ahura-mazdâ builds a
house, with a chaplain, with cattle, with a wife, with sons, with a fair
flock; where man grows the most corn, herbage, and fruit trees; where he
spreads water on a soil without water, and drains off water where
there is too much of it." He who sows corn, sows good, and promotes the
Mazdean faith; "he nourishes the Mazdean religion as fifty men would do
rocking a child in the cradle, five hundred women giving it suck from
their breasts.* When the corn was created the Daêvas leaped, when it
sprouted the Daêvas lost courage, when the stem set the Daêvas wept,
when the ear swelled the Daêvas fled. In the house where corn is
mouldering the Daêvas lodge, but when the corn sprouts, one might say
that a hot iron is being turned round in their mouths." And the reason
of their horror is easily divined: "Whoso eats not, has no power either
to accomplish a valiant work of religion, or to labour with valour,
or yet to beget children valiantly; it is by eating that the universe
lives, and it dies from not eating." The faithful follower of Zoroaster
owes no obligation towards the impious man or towards a stranger,** but
is ever bound to render help to his coreligionist.

* The original text says in a more enigmatical fashion, "he
nourishes the religion of Mazdâ as a hundred feet of men and
a thousand breasts of women might do."

** Charity is called in Parsee language, _ashô-dâd_ the
_gift to a pious man_, or the _gift of piety_, and the pious
man, the _ashavan_, is by definition the worshipper of
Ahura-mazdâ alone.