paint itself, would it not be a sign that they had lost their original colours? And so with men. If all men were humane, filial, and loyal, no one would profess these virtues, and they would therefore never be named. And in the same way, if all men were virtuous, the names even of vices would be unknown.

No wonder that Confucius searched for twenty years for the Taou of Laou-tsze and found it not. "If Taou," said Laou-tsze, “could be offered to men, there is no one who would not wish to offer it to his prince; if it could be presented to men, there is no one who would not wish to present it to his parents; if it could be announced to men, there is no one who would not wish to announce it to his brethren ; if it could be transmitted to men, there is no one who would not wish to transmit it to his children. Why then are not you able to acquire it? This is the reason: it is that you are incapable of giving it an asylum in the bottom of your heart."

"I have

To this Confucius could only reply, in the spirit of a Pharisee, by pleading his works of merit. edited the Book of Odes," said he, "the Book of History, the Book of Rites, the Treatise on Music, and the Book of Transformations, and I have composed the Spring and Autumn Annals; I have read the Maxims of the Ancient Kings; I have brought to light the splendid deeds of the Sages, and yet no one deigns to employ me. It is difficult, I see, to persuade men."

"The six liberal arts," replied Laou-tsze, "are an old heritage from the kings of antiquity. That with which you occupy yourself results only in obsolete

examples, and all you do is to walk in the footprints of the past, without producing anything new."

From this interview Confucius returned to his disciples, and for three days did not utter a word. According to his own account, Laou-tsze exercised a complete fascination over him. He felt, when conversing with the older philosopher, that he was in the presence of a master mind, and the merciless criticism of which his doctrines were the object, shook his faith somewhat in their truth. "At his voice," said he, "my mouth gaped wide, my tongue protruded, and my soul was plunged in trouble."

To Yang-tsze, a disciple of Confucius, Laou-tsze spoke in the same strain. "The spots of the tiger and of the leopard, and the agility of the monkey, are that which exposes them to the arrows of the hunter." And in reply to a question concerning the administration of the illustrious kings of antiquity, he said, "Such was the administration of the illustrious kings, that their merits overspread the empire unknown to themselves; the influence of their example extended to all beings; they effected the happiness of the people without letting them feel their presence. Their virtue was so sublime that human speech is unable to express it; they lived in an impenetrable retreat, and were absorbed in Taou.”

Ir has been stated above that on leaving China on his last impenetrable journey, Laou-tsze put into the hands of the Guardian of the Pass the results of his many years of lonely meditation in the shape of a book containing five thousand characters. Probably no widely-spread religion was ever founded on so small a base. Like an inverted pyramid, the everincreasing growth of Taouist literature and superstitious doctrines which make up the sum of modern. Taouism, rests on this small volume as its ultimate support. We say "ultimate" advisedly, for other works have long surpassed it in popularity. Its philosophical speculations are far beyond the reach of the ordinary reader, and even scholars are obliged to confess that they have but a general idea of the meaning of the old recluse. "It is not easy," says one of the best-known native commentators, "to explain clearly the more profound passages of Laoutsze; all that science is able to do is to give the general sense." 1

To European scholars the difficulty is even greater. As Rémusat remarks in his Mémoire de Lao-tseu, "The text is so full of obscurity, we have so few

'Julien, Introduction to "Le Livre de la Voie, et de la Vertu."

means of acquiring a perfect understanding of it, so little knowledge of the circumstances to which the author makes allusion; we are, in a word, so distant in all respects from the ideas under the influence of which he wrote, that it would be temerity to pretend to reproduce exactly the sense which he had in view, when that sense is beyond our grasp." It is, however, always easy to affix a plausible interpretation to that which is not susceptible of any definite explanation, and consequently a host of commentators and translators have arisen, who find in the Taou-tihking confirmation of their preconceived theories of his meaning, and of their preconceived wishes on his behalf. The early Jesuit missionaries found in its pages a prophetic knowledge of the truths of Christianity. According to Montucci, "the principal object of the Taou-tih-king is to establish a singular knowledge of a Supreme Being in three persons. Many passages speak so clearly of a triune God, that to any one reading this book it will be plain that the mystery of the Holy Trinity was revealed to the Chinese more than five centuries before the coming of Jesus Christ."

Amiot thought he recognised the Three Persons of the Trinity in the first phrase of the fourteenth chapter of the Taou-tih-king, which he translated thus: "That which is as though it were visible, and yet cannot be seen, is called Khi (to be read I); that which is audible, and yet speaks not to the ears, is called Hi; that which is as though it were within one's reach, and yet cannot be touched, is called Wei." Rémusat went even beyond Amiot, and recognised in the three

characters I, Hi, Wei, the word Jehovah. "These three characters," said he, "have no sense as employed here, they simply represent sounds foreign to the Chinese language, whether they are articulated as one word (IHV), or whether the initials I., H., V., are taken separately. . . The trigrammatic name I-HiWei, or IHV, being, as we have seen, foreign to the Chinese language, it is interesting to discover the origin. This word appears to me to be to all intents identical to that of Iaw (a variant of the Hebrew tetragramme n', Jéhova), the name which, according to Diodore of Sicily, the Jews gave to God. It is very remarkable that the most exact transcription of this celebrated name is found in a Chinese book, for Laou-tsze has preserved the aspiration which the Greeks were not able to express with the letters of their alphabet. On the other side we find the Hebrew tetragramme reduced to three letters in the Taou-tih-king. This doubtless makes no difference in the pronunciation, for to all appearance the last n of mn (Jéhova) is not pronounced. . . . The fact of a Hebrew or Syrian word in a Chinese book, a fact hitherto unknown, is certainly singular enough, and it remains, I think, completely proved, though there remains much to be done before it can be satisfactorily explained. . . . This name, so well preserved in the Taou-tih-king that it may be said that the Chinese had a better knowledge and a more exact transcript than the Greeks, is a particularity truly characteristic. It appears to me impossible to doubt that this name did not originate in this form in Syria, and I regard it as an incontestable proof of the

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