Our Own Religion in Ancient Persia - Being Lectures Delivered in Oxford Presenting the Zend Avesta as Collated With the With Exilic Pharisaism, Advancing the Persian Question to the Foremost Position in Our Biblical Research #261474

This collection of separate University Lectures here brought together under one cover, hardly needs any introductory statements, for I have been obliged to explain in the course of editing them particulars usually reserved to a preface. I have been especially careful to forestall any criticism on the part of my readers in regard to the unavoidable repetitions. Sometimes years have passed between the occasions upon which the several treatises have been delivered, and I could not eliminate all allusion to previously stated facts without tearing the lectures to pieces. Moreover, some of them have been read aloud to audiences in Bombay, and this mode of extending my teaching may be repeated, in which case the connection of thought between the lectures will not be so apparent, and the disfigurement of repetition will disappear. Yet while apologising for such occasional redundancy, I must add that I endeavour to increase the directness of the pointing, and also to expand the issues at every recurrence. There are, however, several interior considerations in the treatment of the subject of which large numbers of my readers may have had no opportunity whatever to become aware, nor of what I have endeavoured to do to meet the obligations which rest upon me with regard to them.