VIII
Mr. Gladstone also mentioned in a private letter of October ’91: ‘I am sensible of the extraordinary interest attaching to Zoroastrianism, and grateful to those who . . . afford us such help in understanding it’. With regard to my critical editions, see below, note I, page IX. It is to be. hoped that the public which I am endeavouring new to teach will not need to be informed that the rare value of these hymns arises from their importance in the history of thought and sentiment.
If these pieces were indeed written yesterday they could not be considered contemptible, but they are to be valued chiefly for their rarity as the expression of religious sentiments at their early date, (as to which see S. B. E. XXXI, Introduction p. XXXIII—VII), and as a specimen of . the force of human thought in its influence upon the then coming future.
If we have any respect for the religious ideas of the world and their growth, here are some of their mothers. Not that our own personal feelings are direct descendants from the sentiments expressed in these immortal fragments. but that they are most certainly the descendants of ideas that were cognate to them.
It is needless to say more to those whom I hope will read this book. To the multitude who could mention the inferiority of these pieces. to modern productions, I have nothing whatever to say (turpe pecus), except perhaps that there is a very large mass of modern anthology of which what they affirm could by no means be maintained.
With regard to the other works I would add one word as to the matter of their dates for those who are not in the ‘swim of it’. I would recall that they were begun so long ago as even 1881 when I had already tentatively printed some 390 odd pages of my Gathas (all the texts Zend, Pahlavi, Sanskrit and Persian with translation of the first three). These were imperatively demanded of me by the Pythagoras of Aryan orientalism, the sage of Tuebingen whose ‘ipse dixit’ could make or unmake a reputation.
