Popish Paganism (1612, 4to). See Chalmers, Biog. Diet. xxiii, 389. (J. H. W.)
Ormond, William, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, was born in (ireen County, N. C, Dec. 22, 1769 ; was converted Dec. 11, 1787 ; entered the itinerancy in 1791; travelled and preached extensively from Maryland to Georgia; and died in Brunswick County, Va., Oct. 30, 1803. He was a good and zealous man, and many souls were converted under his labors. — Minutes of Conferences, i, 116.
Ormuzd and Aiiriman. The most difficult re- ligious problem for the mind to solve is that of the ex- istence of evil in this world. If there be a God, then must that God be good; and as nothing can happen without his will, naturally we should expect that the world which he governs would be a place where every- thing would be good, virtuous, and happy. But the contrary is the case. The world, as a matter of fact, is full of evil, of sin, and of misery. Whence, then, comes this? Is the Deity not good? or is his power limited? or how is this conflict which we see actually going on in the world to be explained? Without the higher ideas given us by revelation, the problem could not be solved; but it is interesting to examine what were the conclusions to which the mind of man, unaided by the light of revelation, came by the exercise of its own reasoning powers. It then attempted to solve the problem in two ways : the one was pantheism, the other dualism. In pantheism it is denied that there is any real difference between good and evil. Things do not exist, but merely seem to exist. This whole ex- ternal world is a mere illusion, in which the world-spirit develops itself in various ways, and which finally it will absorb back into itself. Just as the bubbles upon a stream seem to have a separate existence for a time, and rioat upon its surface, bright in the sunshine with reflected colors, and dark and lustreless in the shade, but finally as they break all fall back into the main flood of waters, so is it with men. They seem to have a separate existence for a time, and live some in sun- shine and some in shade, but really they are all por- tions of the world-spirit, and at death become again in- distinguishable parts of his existence, none the better and none the worse for what happened to them in life. It is this same world -spirit which makes the plants grow. They have no merit and no blame for their wholesome or noxious qualities. Beauty, richness of odors, utility earn them no praise; nor is the poison- ous hemlock blamed when it destroys man's life. So human actions are but higher developments of the ac- tivity of this same world-spirit; and as they are his doings, he cannot praise or blame them. Like want, squalor, and crime in a picture, they are unrealities, and nothing follows from them.
It was in India that pantheism was elaborated into a perfect sj-stem ; but the religions both of Egypt and Babylon were based upon the same fundamental idea, which is at the root of pantheism, that good and evil are not essentially opposed, but in appearance only. In the religion of the ancient IMedes and Persians we find a totally different conception. Zoroaster, its re- puted author, had views too high and noble to be con- tented with a solution which ignores the reality of this entire present state of things. On the other hand, he could not believe that the Deity, whom he conceived to be essentially good and altogether perfect, could liim- self have created evil, and admitted it into the world which he had created. There seemed, therefore, but one way to escape from the dilemma, and that was to suppose that evil also had an independent existence, and that there was a struggle in the moral world as well as in material nature. There cold and heat, light and darkness, tempest and sunshine seemed ever at variance, waging perpetual war for the ascendency; and so lie conceived that in opposition to Ormuzd, the good god, and princijilc of goodness, there stood Ahri-
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man, an evil god, and the author of all evil and sorrow and death. Ahriman likewise seemed to him an inde- pendent power, not called into being, but equally eternal with Ormuzd himself; eternal as regards his pre-exist- ence, but not eternal in the future. Zoroaster could not bring himself to believe that this struggle was to go on forever; and therefore, not very logically, he taught that a being endowed with an infinite prc-ex- istence was nevertheless finite. In distant ages three prophets, sprung from Zoroaster, were to bring into the world the three remaining books of the Zend-Avesta, and convert the world to the faith ; and thereupon evil was to disappear, and the whole world become pure and happy, as it was when first created by Ormuzd, before Ahriman had entered it, and marred it by his mischievous activitj%
On closer examination, however, it appears that the Zend-Avesta is not all of the same date, and that this dualism is not found in its most ancient sections. There are very early chapters that contain traces even of a polytheistic nature -worship, in which the gods have no personal existence, but are mere powers, such as the sunshine, the wind, the earth, and fire. As the same sort of worship is found in the older religious basis of India, it seems as if this was the primitive re- ligion of the whole Aryan stock. But this system was too sensuous to long satisfy men's minds, and the next stage in the Zend-Avesta is that in which we have a distinct recognition of deities who are real persons, possessed of self-consciousness and intelligence. These deities are some good and some bad, the former being called ^s!/?YW, "spiritual beings," while the latter are the Devas, or Divs — a word etymologically the same as the Latin Deus, but originally signifying the shy. In Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, and most languages the word has a good meaning, and signifies the Supreme Deity. But the Iranians, in their recoil from nature-worship, gave it a bad sense, and it soon became equivalent with them to fiends and devils.