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"The royal Wan now rests on high,
In dignity above the sky;

Chau as a State had long been known;
Heaven's choice of it at last was shown.
Its lords had gained a famous name;

God kinged them when the season came.

King Wan ruled well when earth he trod;
Now moves his spirit near to God."

In the same way the emperors of the present Manchu line speak of their departed fathers. The concluding hymn for the worship of them in the ancestral temple in the canon of 1826 may be thus rendered:

"Now ye confront, now ye pass by,

Unbound by conditions of place;
Here ye descend, there ye ascend,

Nor leave of your movements a trace.
Still and deep is the chamber behind;
How restful and blessed its space!
Their home have your spirits in heaven,
The shrines there their tablets embrace.
A myriad years their course shall run,
Nor e'er our filial thoughts efface."

For another thing, the spirits of the departed become tutelary guardians of their posterity, dispensing blessings on them if they pursue the course of well-doing, and punishing them if they do wrong, subject, however, in both cases to the will of God.

But what does the Confucian religion of China teach concerning the future state of bad sovereigns and bad men generally? I may almost reply to this question, "Absolutely nothing." Its oracles are dumb on this interesting and important point. There is no purgatory and no hell in the Confucian literature.

There had grown up even before the time of the Sage a doctrine that the retribution of good and evil takes place in time and he himself derived no little benefit in his own. career from it. The distinction between good and evil is never obscured, nor the different issues of the one and the other. Every moralist writes as if he had been charged, like Isaiah, to "say of the righteous that it shall be well with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him, and of the

wicked, Woe unto the wicked; it shall be ill with him, for the reward of his hands shall be given him." Similar proclamations resound all along the line of Chinese history; but the good to the righteous, and the ill to the wicked, are only the prosperity of the one class and the overthrow and ruin of the other in their worldly estate. The retribution of both cases takes place, not in the persons of the good or the bad, but in those of their descendants. I have said that this view of providence had arisen in China before the time of Confucius. There is a distinct enunciation of it in one of the appendixes to the "Yi King," the authorship of which is generally, though not, I think, correctly, ascribed to the Sage himself. It is said, "The family that accumulates goodness is sure to have superabundant happiness; the family that accumulates evil is sure to have superabundant misery." The same teaching appears in the second commandment of our Decalogue. An important and wholesome truth it is that the good-doing and ill-doing of parents are visited on and in their children; but do the sinning parents themselves escape the curse? It is in this form that the subject of future retribution appears among the literati of China, the professed followers of Confucius, at the present day. They do not deny the continued existence of the spirit after death, and they present their sacrifices or offerings to their ancestors, but it is with little or no consideration of whether their lives were good or bad. Those offerings have become unmeaning forms.

One of the most interesting ceremonies conducted at the capital of China was that in which the emperors until very recently performed a sacrificial service twice a year to the spirits of the emperors of all the dynasties before their own. In the canon of 1826, the sovereigns sacrificed to, from Fu-shi in the thirty-fourth century before Christ down to the close of the Ming Dynasty in 1643, amount to a hundred and eighty-eight. These are not nearly all the sovereigns that have reigned during the long period of five thousand years or thereabouts. What names are admitted and what are rejected depends on the reigning emperor and on the members of the Board of Rites. Shih Hwang Ti of Ch'in, the great

enemy of Confucianism, does not appear, nor sovereigns who proved the ruin of their dynasties. Success seems to be the chief consideration ensuring a place. The second and greatest of the emperors of the reigning line laid it down as a rule for his canon-makers that the character of the sovereigns whom they admitted was not to be too critically examined.

Thus the entire silence of the religion of China with regard to the future of the bad is an unsatisfactory feature in it. The only evil issue of an evil course which it intimates, and that not very distinctly, is to be excluded from sharing in the sacrifices to the dead, the force of which as a motive to virtuous conduct I am unable to appreciate.

I think you will judge of Confucius pretty much as I do. His appearance well deserves to be commemorated as an era in the history of his nation; and whatever there is of good and strength in it is mainly due to him. That there is no little of both may safely be inferred from the long continuance of its national history and the growth of its population. It is what it is, politically, socially, and morally, through the teachings of its Sage. It would have been better if those had been allowed to have the sole occupancy of it. But Taoism, before Confucius and since, and Buddhism since our first century, have been sowing their tares in it. I say so with deference to those who think more highly of those systems than I am able to do. And now in this later time our religion, our commerce, our science and arts, our manners and customs, have all found their way to the empire. Will it be to improve and regenerate it, or to weaken and ruin it? The former will be the case if we act to it according to the golden rule of Confucius, and do to the Chinese as we would have them do to us, and according to the still grander maxim of Lao-tsze, and overcome their evil by our good. I look forward to the future of China with considerable anxiety, but with more of hope.

THE LUN YU

OR

ANALECTS OF CONFUCIUS

"Not to speak to a man to whom you ought to speak, is to lose your man; to speak to one to whom you ought not to speak, is to lose your words. Those who are wise will not lose their man, nor yet their words.”

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