but not by worship of God, not by adoration, prayer, submission, the breaking of the human spirit. Rather they were to rise by the strengthening of this human spirit, by contemplation of themselves, their own powers and possibilities of righteousness. Growth was to be from within, not from without. It was to come neither from life's teaching nor from God's gift, but from man's own will.

Of course no such contrast as this is deliberately emphasized by Confucianism. God's side is merely ignored, left scarcely seen; man's power is taught. That is why Confucianism had no quarrel with Buddhism or with other religions. Man, in his struggle against his own folly and weakness, is welcome to find any help he can, whether from gods or from the cloudy borderland to which we of to-day have given many names, but which simpler men of old called "magic." For the main portion of two thousand years Confucianism has been the State religion of China, and through all that time it has never objected to the company of other religions or philosophies.

Turn now to the ancient literature of China, upon which Confucianism is chiefly built. Here also the Master Teacher stands at the dividing line between the China of a remote past and the China that we know. Before his day a literature existed, but was not highly treasured. Confucius pointed out its value, based all his teachings on it, read into it a meaning which perhaps had not before existed. Thus he elevated this literature, or rather what fragments of it time and chance had left, to the rank of a sacred treasure. It became a Holy Scripture. The later followers of Confucius interpreted its simple words as having vast symbolical meanings. Chinese scholars admitted that these subtle precepts might be misexpounded and misunderstood; but when correctly interpreted, their truth was no more to be questioned than that of the Master himself.

The ancient writings thus rescued from oblivion by Confucius are classed with the books attributed to him or to his chief disciples of the next two centuries; and these form the sacred literature of China. The Confucianism of later ages never produced anything but commentaries upon these books, scraps of tradition and interpretations which, as the years drifted idly by, became ever more and more far-fetched and fantastic.

THE FIVE CLASSICS

The writings which Confucius preserved consist of four collections of documents of different classes. With them is included a single historical work by the Master himself; and these five are called the Five King, or Five Ancient Classics.

THE YI KING

yee

First of these comes the YI KING (pronounced keeng"), which means the Book of Changes, or perhaps we might better call it the Book of Divination or of Magic. If we accept Chinese tradition, the oldest portion of this curious and puzzling book had its origin in the very beginning of Chinese civilization, in the year 3322 в.с. This date is given for the founding of the first Chinese kingdom by Fu-hsi, and may be accepted as fairly correct, though some scholars would reduce it by about four centuries. Chronology was not an exact science in the days of Fu-hsi; yet the Chinese annals are much better preserved and give us closer and more reliable figures than any of our recent guesses and approximations upon Babylonian and Egyptian antiquity.

To speak of the Yi, however, as the oldest piece of Chinese literature involves a misconception. All that Fu-hsi contributed to this Yi was its wholly unintelligible foundation. This consists of a series of diagrams, a merely mathematical arrangement of plain, straight lines. These diagrams were used for thousands of years as a basis for magic, for divination of the future; and then, a little before 1100 в.с., two celebrated kings wrote successive explanations, mystical explanations, of the magic meaning of the ancient diagrams. Later commentators added further explanations. Probably Confucius himself wrote some; and all this mass of interpretation upon interpretation constitutes the YI KING.

What was the original source or meaning of these most ancient, mystic diagrams? We do not know. A recent writer has argued that they are a vocabulary, or rather a syllabary, of the writing of some still more ancient people, preserved by the Chinese long after the earlier use and meaning of the signs had been forgotten. This may be true, but if so the mathematical abstractness and precision of this ancient writing argue for man's intellect a previous epoch of growth and thought almost inconceivable. And whatever these silent diagrams may once have been, they have been dignified now by five thousand years of human reverence. They are reverenced to-day. There is no other letter, sign, or sacred symbol of our time that can claim anything like the antiquity of worship which surrounds these irresponsive ancient diagrams. If Chinese scholarship still pores over their every outline and invests them with mysteries of meaning which we can not admit, their age at least gives to the study a fascination which we all can feel)

THE SHU KING

The second of the ancient classics is the SHU KING (pronounced "shoo keeng"), or collection of historic writings. Some of the short books or documents preserved in the Shu are of much earlier date than the written parts of the Yi. With the oldest documents of the Shu therefore, the "literature" of China may be said to commence. There are no present manuscripts of any of the Five Classics which date back more than a thousand years or two; but Chinamen have been talking and writing about the classics ever since Confucius's time, and we can be sure that they have come down to us practically unchanged. As to their existence before the days of the Master, the Shu shows itself clearly for what it is, not a continuous history, but a collection from among older records, many of which had been lost. The surviving documents are of different classes, boastful records of kings not unlike those of Assyria, earnest prayers from humblerminded rulers, solemn moral councils like those of Egyptian scribes, speeches made before battle, outbursts of lamentation. Of these fragmentary records, the oldest speak, and speak in almost contemporary fashion, of King Yao, who ascended the throne about 2400 в.с. This narrative of King Yao's deeds is thus the oldest piece of Chinese literature that has survived; and with it and the rest of the Shu we begin our present volume.

THE SHIH KING

Third of the Chinese classics comes the SHIH KING (pronounced as "ship" without the "p"), or collection of ancient poetry. The compilation of the Shih is by tradition ascribed directly to Confucius. We are told that in his day over three thousand pieces of the ancient poetry existed, and that he collected the worthiest of these to form the Shih, which contains about three hundred.

Whether it be true that Confucius thus rejected the mass of the old poetry, there can be no question of his devotion to the Shih. In his own writings and teachings he referred to it constantly, and often quoted the old poems. "If you do not learn the Shih," he said, "you will not be fit to converse with."

This attitude of the Master has led later Chinamen to approach the Shih with profound reverence. They insist on finding in its every poem some wise religious teaching. Perhaps they have thus been blinded a little as to its real character. To an outsider it seems a much simpler affair, a natural collection of old poems such as our own poets might write to-day - praises of scenery, quaint ballad narratives, outbursts of human passion, intermingled with hymns to gods and flatteries to kings. Some of its pieces seem as old as the seventeenth century B.с.; and so it presents, next to the Shu, the oldest relics of Chinese literature.

THE LI KI

Fourth of the Five King comes the LI KI (pronounced "lee kee"), the collection of rites or ceremonies. This has for a modern reader much less of interest than the other classics; for it is made up, like the book of Leviticus in our Bible, of a mass of royal and priestly rituals. These were constantly added to, even after the time of Confucius, until they came to embody an enormous mass of utterly unreadable literature. Moreover, no sharp distinction was kept between earlier and later rituals. Hence the Li of our day is very different from that known to Confucius.

That the Master should have placed the Li on an equality with the other King, strongly emphasizes one portion of his teaching - his respect for ceremonial. He desired that all things should have dignity, and hence should be done in order and by rule, not left to the hazard of the moment. It was by this teaching, more than anything else, that Confucius barred progress. His countrymen, studying old rituals, learned to do everything perfectly in order, but assumed, unfortunately, that when so done everything must be right. The living spirit, which can alone make ceremony of value, faded from their formulas; and its loss was hardly noted.

SPRING AND AUTUMN

With these four ancient books is classed the fifth King, one of the works of Confucius himself. It is called the Chun Chiu, or the Spring and Autumn. This typically poetical Chinese title conceals a history by which the Master tried, as it were, to complete the Shu. Spring and Autumn tells the history of some two hundred years, ending with the days of Confucius himself. To the modern reader the book seems a mere monotonous record of kings, and is of far less interest than Confucius's other works.

THE FOUR BOOKS OF THE PHILOSOPHERS

The Five King, though not nearly so spiritual as the Old Testament of our Christian Bible, bear a considerable resemblance to it both in theme and in the reverence given them. Confucianism has also its newer scriptures. These are called the Four Great Books, or the Books of the Philosophers, and were written either by the Master himself or by his immediate disciples. The King had dealt with history, with the venerated past. The Philosophers' Books deal with doctrine, with the actual teachings of the Master. Hence we must