and minister or subject, and of friend and friend. A country would be well governed when all the parties in those relationships performed their parts aright; though I must think that he allowed too much to the authority of the higher party in each of them. I do not mean to say that there was no such moral teaching in the literature of China before his time. There was much, but he invested it all with a new grace and dignity. His greatest achievement, however, in his moral teaching was his inculcation of the Golden Rule, which he delivered at least five separate times. Tsze-kung once asked him whether there were any one word which might serve as a rule of practise for all one's life. His reply was, "Is there not shu?" that is, "reciprocity," or "altruism"; and he added the explanation of it: "What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others." The same disciple on another occasion saying that he observed the rule, Confucius simply remarked, "Ah! you have not attained to that!" He tells us, indeed, in one important passage- and we do not think the worse of him for the acknowledgment— that he was not able himself to follow the rule in its positive form in any one of the relationships.

Many of his short sayings are admirable in their pith and sagacity. What could be better than these?

"Learning without thought is labor lost; thought without learning is perilous."

"It is only the truly virtuous who can love or hate others." "Can there be love which does not lead to strictness in the training of its object? Can there be loyalty which does not lead to the instruction of its object?"

"To be poor without murmuring is difficult; to be rich without being proud is easy."

Some of his sayings, indeed, are somewhat enigmatical. For instance, "Let a good man teach the people seven years, and they may then likewise be employed in war"; and again, "To lead an uninstructed people to war is to throw them away." But from these commentators deduce the lesson that when a people are well trained in a knowledge of all their duties, they will be prepared to die for their country and

VOL. XI.-17.

king. The more educated the lower classes of a people are, however, the less likely are they to allow themselves to be led by their superiors to the battle-field.

There was nothing he liked to set forth so much as the character of his superior or ideal man. Take a few of his deliverances on this subject: "The superior man is catholic, and not a partisan." "He does what is proper to the position in which he is; he does not desire to go beyond it. He finds himself in no position in which he is not himself." I will give you one more specimen, and only one: "The scholar considers leal-heartedness and good faith to be his coat of mail and helmet, propriety and righteousness to be his shield and buckler; he walks along, bearing over his head benevolence; he dwells holding righteousness in his arms before him; the government may be violently oppressive, but he does not change his course: such is the way in which he maintains himself."

It may occur to you that, notwithstanding all I have said, Confucius does not appear to you in any other character but as an ethical teacher of great merit. He enunciated, for instance, as we have seen, the Golden Rule; but he did not, or would not, appreciate the still higher rule, when his attention was called to it, that good should be returned for injury or evil, and that the evil will thereby be overcome. This loftiest of all maxims was enunciated by Lao-tze, and when submitted to Confucius, his judgment on it was, "With what, then, will you recompense good or kindness? Recompense injury with justice, and kindness with kindness." And when the subject subsequently came before him in his intercourse with his disciples, he never advanced beyond that deliverance. Again, while Confucius taught truthfulness, there are many passages in the " Spring and Autumn," which he claimed especially as his own work, that awaken doubts as to its historical veracity. But, after all, these charges are not very heavy, and he would have recked little of them himself. When he was once charged with slighting an important rule of propriety, all that he said in reply was, "I am fortunate. If I have any errors, people are sure to know them."

You will not be sorry to hear the magnificent eulogium which his grandson pronounced on the ideal sage and king, being understood to have had Confucius in his mind:

"Possessed of all sagely qualities, showing himself quick in apprehension, clear in discernment, of far-reaching intelligence and all-embracing knowledge, he was fitted to exercise rule; magnanimous, generous, benign, and mild, fitted to exercise forbearance; impulsive, energetic, firm, and enduring, fitted to maintain a strong hold; self-adjusted, grave, never swerving from the Mean and correct, fitted to command reverence; accomplished, distinctive, concentrative, and searching, fitted to exercise discrimination. Therefore his fame overspreads the Middle Kingdom, and extends to all barbarous tribes. Wherever ships and carriages reach, wherever the strength of man penetrates, wherever the heaven overshadows and the earth sustains, wherever the sun and moon shine, wherever frosts and dews fall, all who have blood and breath unfeignedly honor and love him."

Let me pass on now to consider what is the nature of the religion of China - what it was in the very earliest times, and what it continues substantially to be at the present day. As we succeed in the study and exhibition of this, we shall discover more clearly the deep foundation of the moral teaching of Confucius, and wherein the religion itself fails to supply to the Chinese people all that is necessary for the nourishment of their spiritual being and the making of them what they ought to be.

There have been from time immemorial two sacrificial services in China: one addressed to the Supreme Being, and the other to the spirits of the dead. I call them sacrificial services in accordance with the general usage of writers on the subject; but we must not import into the words "sacrifice" and "sacrificial" all the ideas which we attach to them. The most common term for "sacrifice" in Chinese is tsi, and the most general idea symbolized by it is an offering whereby communication and communion with spiritual beings are effected. The offerings, we are told, and the language employed in presenting them, were for the purpose of

prayer, or of thanksgiving, or of deprecation. Our meaning of substitution and propitiation does not enter into the term, excepting in the sense of making propitious and friendly.

I will speak first of the former service.

The earliest name for the Supreme Being among the Chinese fathers appears to have been Thien, or "Heaven." When the framers of their characters made one to denote "Heaven" they fashioned it from two already existing characters, representing "one" and "great," signifying the vast and bright firmament, overspreading and embracing all, and from which came the light, heat, and rain which rendered the earth beneath fruitful and available for the support and dwelling of man and all other living beings on its surface. But their minds did not rest in the material, or, I might almost say, the immaterial sky. The name soon became symbolical to them of a Power and Ruler, a spiritual Being, whom they denominated Ti, "God," and Shang Ti, "the supreme God." I can not render these terms in English in any other way. The Chinese dictionaries tell us that Ti represents the ideas of lordship and rule. So it was that the name for the "sky" which they beheld became to the earliest Chinese personal, as the denomination of their concept of God.

The worship of God was associated with a worship of the more prominent objects of nature, such as heaven and earth, the sun and moon, the starry host, hills and streams, forests and valleys. It has been contended from this that the most ancient religion of the Chinese was a worship of the objects of nature. I do not think it was so, and I am supported in my opinion by the express testimony of Confucius, that "by the ceremonies of the sacrifices to heaven and earth they served God." These words supply an instance of his infrequent use of the personal name, which he employed, I suppose, to give greater emphasis to his declaration. If it was so in the worship of those greatest objects of nature, much more must it have been so in that of the inferior objects. Even though the presidency of those objects may be ignorantly and superstitiously assigned to different spiritual