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and the origins of Islam having appeared in Hebrew,* of which the author is C. Bernfeld. The publisher has made the mistake of adorning the work, which in other respects is interesting, with an altogether fantastic portrait of Muhammad the Arabian prophet is not even represented with Semitic features !

The learned Arabic scholar, R. Basset, is following up his Oriental publications, which are always full of interest, with unabated zeal. We have to mention two of his works. The most important is, "Le Tableau de Cèbès," being the Arabic version of a well-known Greek moral treatise, translated by Ibn Miskaoueih (A.D. 1029). The Greek original appears to be the work of a Stoic of the latter part of the first century of the Christian era. Professor Basset has published the Arabic text with his French translation, which is accompanied by an introduction and numerous notes. We strongly recommend this valuable work. The other work of Basset relates to an Arab legend of Spain: "La Maison fermée de Tolède."‡ In the "Mélanges Weil" has also appeared a study in Greek philosophy by H. Derenbourg. It is entitled "Les Traducteurs arabes d'Auteurs grecs et l'Auteur musulman des Aphorismes des Philosophes."§ Derenbourg, whose work is an excellent and judicious criticism, shows that the author of the collection of "Aphorismes" was a Musalman, named Muhammad ibn 'Ali ibn Ibrahim ibn Ahmad Al-Ansári, and not, as was supposed, a Christian, the physician Abu Zaid Honain ibn Ishák. It is a manuscript of the Escurial, written in the Magrebi of Spain during the year A.H. 594, which has preserved the only trace of the real author. A facsimile of the first page of the manuscript accompanies Derenbourg's work.

In the "Mittheilungen" of the Seminary of Oriental languages of Berlin, which we have mentioned above, is contained an interesting collection of Moroccan proverbs (text and translation annotated) published by A. Fischer. In this context we would draw attention to the following maxim, which exhibits a broad and unconventional spirit (not often to be met with in Morocco !), and which we reproduce in the Moroccan orthography.

الجهاد
الخدمة علي لولاد فضل من الحج و

"To care for your children is better than pilgrimage and holy war." In conclusion, we may mention a thesis written by a candidate for the Doctor's degree of the University of Berne, which merits attention-the Kitáb Bagdád of Abul Fadl Ahmad ibn Abi Táhir Taifúr (A.H. 204-280). This dissertation of H. Keller includes the Arabic text, its German translation and a preface.

.1898 ,Warsaw, Tuschijah .מחמד תולדות חייו וראשית לדת דת האיטלס •

† Algiers, Fontana, 1898.
§ Paris, Fontemoing, 1898.
¶ Leipzig, Drugulin, 1898.

Oran, Fouque, 1898.
|| Berlin and Stuttgart, Spemann, 1898.

"GOD HAS NO OPPOSITE."

(A SERMONETTE FROM THE PERSIAN.)

BY PROFESSOR LAWRENCE MILLS, D.D., OXFORD.

See

(THIS little piece was suggested to me by a fresh consideration of the doctrines of rational dualism as set forth in the Pahlavi literature. the Asiatic Quarterly Review for July, 1897, pp. 103-110.)

We have all of us noticed that ideas develop not so much in circles as in spirals. We find the old thoughts coming again, as history unfolds itself, but they always reappear increased. This is perhaps as apparent as anywhere in the familiar argument by which we try to harmonise for ourselves the blemishes which we observe everywhere in our personal destiny and in that of others—that is to say, in the argument by which we accept these miseries on the score of antithesis.

Hegel, and Fichte before him, used this procedure more fully than others among moderns; but devout clergy whose religion no longer includes a cold acquiescence in human sufferings have often urged upon their hearers as a consolation the necessity of evil to the development of the good, of sorrow to the possibility of happiness.

But obvious as such thoughts may be, and vital as they certainly seem to all men in their attempts to smooth out the wrinkles on the face of things, we little expect to find them expressed to a nicety at such a time as the thirteenth century, and in such a place as Persia; and it is equally startling to find their very detail worked out in a style which reminds us of the much-praised but sometimes belittled philosopher of Stuttgart The Masnavi is the Bible of the Persians, and Jelal u-din Rumi is their apostle of the Prophet. No book of antiquity, or modern days, is, all things considered, more remarkable than his production. Wit, humour, poetry and rhyme express its sometimes postprandial pantheism, and these are offset with conceptions which are often sublime and a piety which was doubtless sincere. When he comes to philosophical hair-splittings in the style of the mystics he is very acute, although, as he himself confesses, he often sews himself up. On this matter of antithesis he is especially rich, and he gives us in many a place "Hegelianism before Hegel." Here is a bit of his doctrine of limit.

"Errors occur not without some truth. If there were no truth, how could error exist. Truth is the Night of Power hidden among other nights in order to try the spirit of every night. Not every night is that Night of Power, nor yet is everyone devoid of power. If there were no bad goods in the world every fool might be a buyer, for the hard act of judging would be easy; and if there were no faults one man could judge

Hegel was born in Stuttgart, where a marble slab bearing his name is set in the facing of the house which claims to be his birthplace.

as well as another. If all were faulty, where would be the skill? If all wood were common, where would be the aloes? He who accepts everything is silly, and he who says that all is false is a knave. . .

...

"Discern form from substance, O son, as lion from desert. When thou seest the waves of speech, know that there is an ocean beneath them. Every moment the world and we are renewed. Life is like a stream renewed and ever renewed (compare Hegel's 'All is flow' as borrowed from Heraclitus). It wears the appearance of continuity of form; the seeming continuity arises from the very swiftness of the motion (p. 3); a spark whirled round has the appearance of a circle."* He expresses the principle of this on page 31, book i. Here he begins and slowly works his way up to a statement so great as nearly to silence us with respect for him. Commencing with the usual instance of light and colour, he goes on; "and so with mental colours. At night there is no light, and so no colour, but by this we know what light is, by darkness. Opposite shows up opposite as the white man the negro; the opposite of light shows us what is light; hence colours are known by their opposites. God created pain and grief to show happiness through its opposite. Hidden things are manifested thus." And then come the (to a scholastic) magnificent words, "God has no opposite; He remains hidden." God has no opposite; He is all-inclusive. We are all of us a little pantheistic nowadays, although on Hegel's law we may still claim to be orthodox; and who that thinks has not been, or will not be, mentally moved by the conception of that inclusiveness. "He has no opposite."

All that exists exists through His will, and has ever so existed. The discoveries of physical science, the still more far-reaching ones of the purely mental, only define his indefinableness, and make Him greater.

He has no opposite, not in the realms of the moral idea, not in the close distinctions of the exact or the quasi exact sciences, not in the physical astrologies of the skies, not in the range of mathematics surpassing imagination, nor in the scope of æsthetics which are as minute as they are expanded. The telescope and the microscope are as powerless as is that world of sensibility which is called into life by music or colour. Nowhere is He arrested or described. Sorrow cannot say to Him "Here is your limit," nor Pain declare "Me you never made." Even the old conceptions of future torment which exist clear and distinct as ideas at least, almost as dreadful as the supposed realities; nothing, nothing is without Him, or so opposed as to define Him; He has no opposite. But He has detail, if we might so express ourselves. He has no opposite, but His actual deeds and attributes are made up of them. He can never be defined, but we can approach a definition. Every opposite that we discover brings Him nearer. All the thronging results of science may be said to be the discoveries of opposites. Every opposite found out by brain, or eye, or glass, or measure; every tool with its adapted edge, every structure in the subdivisions of mechanics is an added item in the rearing

Compare book ii., page 165. I have not followed Mr. Wynfield's most impressive and effective translation literally, but I have preferred it to others.

+ The italics are mine.

of that great edifice made up of differences out of which we approach Him. Without the recognition of difference no consciousness can exist, and the pang of misery is the actual condition to the thrill of rapture as to the calm of peace.

Surely it is a consoling as well as an impressive thought to the thinker, that notwithstanding the conflicts in his mental processes he does not think in vain that to the universe of opposites on which he works there is a unity towards which he may indefinitely progress.* "God has no opposite"; it gives consolation to the doer, for he knows that every result which he brings forth, sharply facing either menace or defect, brings him nearer to the Harmonised. Well may we accept the "pulse of thought," "the grasp," ""the split," "the combination." What consolation above all it gives the sufferer! How oppositions tend to make us doubt! How can there be a purpose in so much treason, such equivocation, and such oppression as we see? How is it possible that there can be anything so mean? Surely here, if anywhere, is God's Opposite. Yet even here the old Persian's word holds good. God means the caitiff as the only being that can define the good. That good is somewhere, and all of us will be sure some day to find it out. God has no opposite, and He perhaps never makes us more acutely sensitive to His Goodness than when He permits us to recoil and with disgust from what seems the contradictory opposite of all that He can be.

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TWENTY-SECOND REVIEW ON THE

"SACRED BOOKS OF THE EAST" SERIES.

CLARENDON PRESS, OXFORD.

VOL. XLVII.-PAHLAVI TEXTS-PART V. MARVELS OF ZOROASTRIANISM. TRANSLATED BY E. W. WEST.

BY JOHN BEAMES, B.C.S. (RET.).

UNDER this appropriate title the learned translator has collected three texts, all dealing with the same subject, the legendary history of Zoroaster and his religion. The first and longest is the seventh book of the Dinkard, which is supposed to embody the greater part of the lost Spend Nask; the second is a brief account of the same subject from the fifth book of the Dinkard; and the third consists of extracts from the selections of Zâdsparam, a compilation made by a priest of Sirkân near Karmân, about A.D. 900, from religious texts then extant.

In a religion so peculiarly circumstanced as the Mazdayasna, which lost nearly all its original scriptures some twenty-three centuries ago, and has been living ever since on the few fragments which have escaped destruction, eked out by legends of various kinds, and by traditions as to what were the contents of the lost portions, it is necessary to make the most of every scrap of ancient writing, and even of writings which though not themselves ancient appear to embody the contents of the primitive documents. Hence the value attached by Iranian scholars to texts which under any other circumstances would be passed by as unimportant.

The chief point of interest in the present collection lies not so much in the marvellous legends about Zoroaster and his religion, which can scarcely be said to have a practical value to any but specialists, as in the materials which they supply for harmonizing Zoroastrian chronology with that of European history, and in the light which they throw on the rise and development of this peculiar creed. It may however be interesting to give a brief summary of the legends before considering the wider question of the chronology.

In the first of the three texts the subject is introduced by an account of the ancient royal line of Iran from the primeval man Gâyomard, through the renowned Peshdâdian and Kayânian dynasties down to Kai Vishtâsp, the monarch contemporary with Zoroaster, or Zaratûsht as the name is written in Pahlavi. Bald and prosaic is the narrative, and judging from the translation very obscure and involved the style. Though the names in their Pahlavi form are obviously the same as those recorded by the vates sacer Firdausi in the brilliant and fascinating pages of the Shâhnâma, there is none of the mystic charm and glamour which the poet throws around Jamshid and Faridun, Afrasyâb and Rustam, though he probably drew his information from these old Pahlavi compilations. It would be a curious and interesting task to trace the legends of the Shâhnâma to their Zoroastrian sources, and to endeavour to discover how much or how little of real history lies hid under those old world fables.

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