learning. When the skilful reader has explored it with delight till he has apprehended it, he may carry it into practice all his life, and will find that it cannot be exhausted."22

My own opinion of it is much less favourable. The names by which it has been called in translations of it have led to misconceptions of its character. Were it styled "The states of Equilibrium and Harmony," we should be prepared to expect something strange and probably extravagant. Assuredly we should expect nothing more strange or extravagant than what we have. It begins sufficiently well, but the author has hardly enunciated his preliminary apothegms, when he conducts into an obscurity where we can hardly grope our way, and when we emerge from that, it is to be bewildered his gorgeous but unsubstantial pictures of sagely perfection. He has eminently contributed to nourish the pride of his countrymen. He as exalted their sages above all that is called God or is worshipped, nd taught the masses of the people that with them they have need f nothing from without. In the mean time it is antagonistic to Christianity. By-and-by, when Christianity has prevailed in China, men will refer to it as a striking proof how their fathers by their isdom knew neither God nor themselves

22 The Introductory note, p. 247.

CHAPTER V.

CONFUCIUS AND HIS IMMEDIATE DISCIPLES.

SECTION I.

LIFE OF CONFUCIUS.

1. "And have you foreigners surnames as well?" This question has often been put to me by Chinese. It marks the ignorance which belongs to the people of all that is external to them

His ancestry.

selves, and the pride of antiquity which enters largely as an element into their character. If such a pride could in any case be justified, we might allow it to the family of the K'ung, the descendants of Confucius. In the reign of K'ang-he, twenty-one centuries and a half after the death of the sage, they amounted to eleven thousand males. But their ancestry is carried back through a period of equal extent, and genealogical tables are common, in which the descent of Confucius is traced down from Hwang-te, the inventor of the cycle, B.C. 2637.1

The more moderate writers, however, content themselves with exhibiting his ancestry back to the commencement of the Chow dynasty, B.C. 1121. Among the relatives of the tyrant Chow, the last emperor of the Yin dynasty, was an elder brother, by a concubine, named K'e,2 who is celebrated by Confucius, Ana. xvIII. i., under the title of the viscount of Wei. Foreseeing the impending ruin of their family, K'e withdrew from the court; and subsequently, he was invested by the emperor Shing, the second of the house of Chow, with the principality of Sung, which embraced the eastern portion of the present province of Ho-nan, that he might there continue the sacrifices to the emperors of Yin. K'e was followed as duke of Sung by a younger brother, in whose line the succession

1 See Memoires concernant les Chinois, Tome XII, p. 447, et seq. Father Amiot states, p. 501. that he had seen the representative of the family, who succeeded to the dignity of A in the 9th year of K'een-lung, A.D. 1744. It is hardly necessary that I should say here, that t name Confucius is merely the Chinese characters

(Kung Foo-tsze, ‘The master,