no apprehension. "The mountain falling came to nought, and the rock was removed out of its place. So death prevailed against him, and he passed. His countenance was changed, and he was sent away."

I have thus given a very condensed outline of the events of Confucius' life. Of his personal appearance, his habits, and his sayings we have abundant details in the records of his disciples. He was tall, and methodical, doing everything in the proper way, time, and place. He was nice in his eating, but not a great eater. He was not a total abstainer from spirituous drink, but he never took too much. To confine myself to what they tell us of him as a teacher :-They found him free from foregone conclusions, arbitrary determinations, obstinacy, and egoism; he would not talk with them about extraordinary things, feats of strength, rebellious disorder, and spiritual beings; he frequently discoursed to them about the Books of Poetry and History and the Rules of Propriety; there were three things, he said, in which the greatest caution was required,-fasting (as preparatory to sacrifice), going to war, and the treatment of disease; he insisted on their cultivating letters, ethics, leal-heartedness, and truthfuland there were three things on which he seldom dwelt, -the profitable, the decrees of Heaven, and perfect virtue.

ness;

He held that society was made up of five relationships,-those of husband and wife, of parent and child, of elder and younger brother, or generally of elders and youngers, of ruler 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 practice for all one's life. His reply was, "Is there not shû ()?" 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 labour 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 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 battlefield.

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; but I did not wish in this part of the lecture to exhibit him in any other. Wherein we must attach to his teachings a religious sanction will be seen in the other part, to which I will immediately proceed.

Certain failures in his character and writings, moreover, have been pointed out, and by no one so much as myself. 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 Lâotsze, 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 honour and love him." Secondly, 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 T'ien, or "Heaven." When the framers of their characters made one to denote "Heaven" (F), they fashioned it from two already existing characters, representing "one" (-) and "great" (K), 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 T(), "God," and Shang Ti (E), "the supreme God." I cannot render these terms in English in any other way. The Chinese dictionaries tell us that Tt 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 same process of thought must have taken place among our own early Fathers, though the personal name has displaced the material and symbolical term among us much more than it has among the Chinese. The name Heaven for God, however, has not altogether disappeared from our common speech. Witness such phrases as Heaven knows," "Please Heaven." I find the same significance in the words of Daniel to the Babylonian Nebuchadnezzar, "Thou shalt know that the Heavens do rule"; and in the penitent language of the returning prodigal, "Father, I have sinned against Heaven and in thy sight."

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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 unfrequent 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 Beings, the prayers to them show that the worship of them is still a service of God. In a prayer, for instance, to the Cloud-master, the Rain-master, the Lord of the Winds, and the Thunder-master, it is said, "It is yours, O Spirits, to superintend the clouds and the rain, and to raise and send abroad the winds, as ministers assisting the supreme God." To the spirits of all the hills and rivers under the sky, again, it is said, "It is yours, O Spirits, with your Heaven-conferred powers and nurturing influences, each to preside over one district, as ministers assisting the Great Worker and Transformer."

Thus then I may affirm that the religion of China was, and is, a monotheism, disfigured indeed by ignorance and superstition, but still a monotheism, based on the belief in one Supreme Being, of Whom, and through Whom, and to Whom are all things.

Very soon that religion became a State-worship, and in doing so it took a peculiar form. The only performer allowed in it is "the One man,” the sovereign of the nation himself. Its celebration, moreover, is limited to a few occasions, the greatest being that at the winter solstice. Then the service is, or ought to be, an acknowledgment by the Emperor, for him

.self, his line, and the people, of their obligations to God. It is said of this ceremony, that it is "the utmost expression of reverence" and "the greatest act of thanksgiving." It may have degenerated into a mere formality, but there is the original idea underlying it. It grew probably from the earliest patriarchal worship, though there is no record of that in Chinese literature. The sovereign stands forth in it, both the father and priest of his people. I do not term him the high-priest, for there is no other priest in all the empire. No one is allowed in the same direct manner to sacrifice to God. There never has been in China a priestly class or caste, and I cannot consider this a disadvantage. The restriction of the direct, solemn worship of God to the Emperor has been unfortunate, excluding the people generally from that communion with Him which is the highest privilege of man and the most conducive to the beauty and excellence of his whole character; but better this even than a priestly class, claiming to stand between men and God, themselves not better than other men, and in no respect more highly gifted, and yet shutting up the way into the holiest that is open to all, and assuming to be able by rites and performances of theirs to dispense blessings which can only be obtained from the great God with Whom all have to do.

Only on one other point in this part of my lecture will I touch: the relation between men and God as their Governor and the connection between the religion and morality. King T'ang, the founder of the Shang dynasty in B.C. 1766, thus spoke :-"The great God has conferred even on the inferior people a moral sense, compliance with which would show their nature invariably right. To make them tranquilly pursue the course which it would indicate is the work of the sovereign." Much to the same effect spoke Wû, the first king of the Châu dynasty, in B.C. 1122:-"He even, to help the inferior people, made for them rulers, and made for them instructors, who should be assisting to God, so as to secure tranquillity throughout the nation." Thus government is from God and teaching is from God. They are both divine ordinances. The king and the sage are equally God's ministers, having their respective functions; and they have no other divine right to their positions but that which arises from the fulfilment of their duties. The dynasty that does not rule so as to secure the wellbeing of the people has forfeited its right to the throne. An old poet, celebrating the rise of the dynasty of which he was a scion, thus sang :—

"Oh! great is God; His glance on earth He bent,
Scanning our regions with severe intent

For one whose rule the people should content.
"The earlier lines of kings had practised ill,

And ruling, ruled not after God's just will;

He therefore 'mong the States was searching still.”

So it was with the sovereign; and as for the teacher, if he did not set forth aright the will of God, he had no function at all.

See the application of all this to the case of Confucius and the religious character which it imparts to his moral teachings. The treatise of his