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Shoo-king, the Ly-king, the Chun-tsieu, and the Yě-king.

The Sky-king.-The Sky-king is a book of sacred songs. It consists of about three hundred brief poems, selected by Confucius from a mass of rubbish handed down by antiquity, or supplied by his contemporaries. It is divided into four portions, of which the first is called Kuo-foong; or, "The manners of different states :" that is, of the states into which a portion of the empire, as it now exists, was then divided. The second and third parts are said to have been composed for the purpose of being sung on state occasions. They consist of pieces which treat of the virtuous actions of heroes and sages, or express their sentiments. The fourth portion of the work is composed of eulogies on the ancestors of the Chow dynasty, then filling the throne, and on the great personages of antiquity. These appear to have been a species of ode sung before the emperor, when he rendered sacrifices in the temples of Heaven and Earth, or in the hall of his revered ancestors.

The merits of this poetical canon are very questionable. Most of the songs and odes are of a very humble order; and taken with their commentary, which is very minute, their style and language are frequently unintelligible. It seems doubtful, indeed, whether they ever answered the end proposed, which is discovered in the following notion which the Chinese have of poetical language:- "The human feelings, when excited, become embodied in words; when words fail to express them, sighs or inarticulate tones suc

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ceed; when these are inadequate to do justice to feeling, then recourse is had to song.' At all events, the poetry of the Sky-king falls very far short of poetical merit, when compared with the contemporaneous soul-stirring strains of the Greeks and Romans. These, in reality, were calculated to do "justice to feeling."

The Shoo-king.-The Shoo-king is a history of the deliberations between the two ancient emperors, Yaou and Shun, and some minor rulers. Like most of the other canonical works, it chiefly turns upon the art of good government. To this end, Confucius puts maxims into their mouths, which he quotes as models of perfection. Thus, for example, he makes them say:-"It is vain to expect that good government can proceed from vicious minds." Every notion of good government is, indeed, represented as founded on certain principles, good in themselves, and which, if observed, bring order, but if abandoned, anarchy.

It is in the Shoo-king that a notice of the deluge is discovered, as before noticed. See p. 3.

The Ly-king. The Ly-king, or Book of Rites, is considered as the foundation of the present state of Chinese manners, and a chief cause of their unchangeableness. This seems very probable, for it carries out the leading principle of Chinese moralists and rulers; namely, to subdue the passions, and reduce the mind to a state of torpor. The Ly-king contains directions for about three thousand ceremonial usages, and the tribunal of the Le-poo is charged with the guardianship and interpretation thereof. Hence they are made as unalterable as the laws of the Medes

and Persians, which were neither changed nor abrogated. This is a fearful fact; for the chains by which the minds of the Chinese are thereby manacled, are such as no human effort can shake off. The gospel, by its mighty power, can alone set them free.

The Chun-tsieu.-This work is a history of the times of Confucius, and is, strictly speaking, his only original work. Its chief object appears to have been to afford warning and examples to the rulers of the country; for in it he reproves their misgovernment, and inculcates the maxims of the "ancient kings," as unfolded at large in the Shoo-king for their guidance. It seems surprising that such maxims should have formed the groundwork of a mere Asiatic despotism-for such they are nominally—whether they were the emanations of the minds of the ancient kings, or Confucius himself. But the fact seems to be, that all the Chinese rulers, convinced of their wisdom, gladly adopted them for their guidance, though they generally eschewed their practice.

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The Ye-king. This work, as its title signifies, is a mystical exposition of what some consider an ancient theory of creation, and of the changes that are perpetually occurring in nature. would be uninteresting to the reader to enter into its dry and unmeaning details at large, and therefore one example of the fallacies with which it abounds may serve for an example of the whole. In the Ye-king, there are eight arithmetical diagrams, called " the diagrams of Fo-hy." These bear some resemblance to the mystical numbers of the Greek philosopher Pythagoras, who allowed his speculations to be perverted by dreams of

mysterious virtue in certain numbers and combinations; for instance, the Ye-king speaks of the origin of all created things under the name of Tae-keih; and it is represented by a figure worked after this problem :—" "On the semidiameter of a given circle describe a semicircle; and on the remaining semidiameter, but on the other side, describe another semicircle." This figure represents the Tae-keih; and the twice divided portions formed by the curved line typify the Yang and Yin, which bears a singular parallel to that extraordinary Egyptian fiction, the supposed intervention of a masculo-feminine principle in the development of the mundane egg: a fiction which found its way into Greece and India, where Brahma is spoken of as emanating from a golden egg. Thus the Tae-keih is said to have produced the Yang and Yin; that is, the active and passive, or male and female principle; and these last to have produced all things. To illustrate this, it may be mentioned that they call heaven Yang, and the earth Yin; the sun Yang, and the moon Yin; and the supposed analogy is carried throughout creation. All animate and inanimate nature are distinguished by them into masculine and feminine. Even vegetable productions are made male and female, as, for instance, there is male and female bamboo. Numbers themselves are conceived by them to have genders: a unit and every odd number is male; two, and every even number, is female.

The general drift of this system is manifest: it is material. Having lost sight of the Creator of the universe, the Chinese philosophers attributed the propagation of every creature to the

creature. Hence Tien, or Heaven, in common conversation, is spoken of in terms of respect equivalent to "venerable father," while the Earth is called "mother." Between these all sublunary things are said to have been produced, they having first been created by the mystical Tae-keih. How unmeaning and vague do such speculations appear, when compared with these great and sublime truths:

"In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth," Gen. i. 1.

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By the word of the Lord were the heavens made;

And all the host of them by the breath of his mouth.
He gathereth the waters of the sea together as an heap :
He layeth up the depth in storehouses.

Let all the earth fear the Lord:

Let all the inhabitants of the world stand in awe of him.
For he spake, and it was done;

He commanded, and it stood fast." Psa. xxxiii. 6-9.

This review of the classical or sacred books of the Chinese, shows that the philosophers by whom they were written, saw that the multitude were gone far astray from the path of moral rectitude, but how to restore them they knew not. They found them idolaters-they left them idolaters still. Ages had rolled away since any just notion of a Supreme Being had been entertained in China, and reason was too impotent to restore a knowledge of him or his unsearchable ways.

Notwithstanding, therefore, the writings of Confucius and his disciples may have modified the government of China, and, in some degree, ameliorated the condition of the people, they still left the emperor, the court, and his subjects at large, superstitious. With their rites and ceremonies they did not interfere. Rather by the compila

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