The idea of angels and devils has also spread from the far East; the Jews learned it from the Babylonians, and from the Jews and the Egyptians it passed into Christianity.  The Persian theology had seven angels of the highest order, who ever surrounded Ormuzd, the good creator; and from this the Jews derived the seven archangels always before the Lord, and the Christians the “seven spirits of God” (Rev. iii. 1), and the “seven angels which stood before God” (Ibid, viii. 2).  The Persians had four angels—­one at each corner of the world; Revelation has “four angels standing on the four corners of the earth” (vii. 1).  The Persians employed them as Mediators with the Supreme; the majority of Christians now do the same, and all Christians did so in earlier times.  Origen, Tertullian, Chrysostom, and other Fathers, speak of angels as ruling the earth, the planets, etc.  Michael is the angel of the Sun, as was Hercules, and he fights with and conquers the dragon, as Hercules the Python, Horus the monster Typhon, Krishna the serpent.  The Persians believed in devils as well as in angels, and they also had their chief, Ahriman, the pattern of Satan.  These devils—­or dews, or devs—­struggled against the good, and in the end would be destroyed, and Ahriman would be chained down in the abyss, as Satan in Rev. xx.  Ahriman flew down to earth from heaven as a great dragon (Rev. xii. 3 and 9), the angels arming themselves against him (Ibid, verse 7).  Strauss remarks:  “Had the belief in celestial beings, occupying a particular station in the court of heaven, and distinguished by particular names, originated from the revealed religion of the Hebrews—­had such a belief been established by Moses, or some later prophet—­then, according to the views of the supranaturalist, they might—­nay, they must—­be admitted to be correct.  But it is in the Maccabaean Daniel and in the apocryphal Tobit that this doctrine of angels, in its more precise form, first appears; and it is evidently a product of the influence of the Zend religion of the Persians on the Jewish mind.  We have the testimony of the Jews themselves that they brought the names of the angels with them from Babylon” ("Life of Jesus,” vol. i., p. 101).

Dr. Kalisch, after having remarked that “the notions [of the Jews] concerning angels fluctuated and changed,” says that “at an early period, the belief in spirits was introduced into Palestine from eastern Asia through the ordinary channels of political and commercial interchange,” and that to the Hebrew “notions heathen mythology offers striking analogies;” “it would be unwarranted,” the learned doctor goes on, “to distinguish between the ‘established belief of the Hebrews’ and ‘popular superstition;’ we have no means of fixing the boundary line between both; we must consider the one to coincide with the other, or we should be obliged to renounce all historical inquiry.  The belief in spirits and demons was not a concession made by educated men to the prejudices of the masses,