external, of undervaluing natural impulses of the heart. "Propriety," says Legge, "was a great stumbling-block in the way of Confucius. His morality was the result of the balancings of his intellect, fettered by the decisions of men of old, and not the gushings of a loving heart, responsive to the promptings of Heaven, and in sympathy with erring and feeble humanity." It is high time that an effective protest was made against such an amazing piece of misrepresentation. With bitter truth we may retort that "propriety"—that is, the Chinese word li which has been cruelly saddled with this absurd rendering—has indeed been a stumbling-block, but a stumbling-block not so much to Confucius as to Dr. Legge himself. The whole tenor of the Master's teaching cries aloud against such wilful and outrageous distortion. Any one who reads the sayings carefully will soon discover that this accusation is not only libellous but grotesque in its remoteness from the truth. If there is one thing more than another which distinguishes Confucius from the men of his day, it is the supreme importance which he attached to jên, the feeling in the heart, as the source of all right conduct, the stress which he laid on the internal as opposed to the external, and even on motives rather than outward acts, except in so far as these might be taken as an index to character. Over and over again he gave proof of the highest and noblest moral courage in ignoring the narrow rules of conventional morality and etiquette when these conflicted with good feeling and common sense, and setting up in their stead the grand rule of conscience which, by asserting the right of each individual to judge such matters for himself, pushed liberty to a point which was quite beyond the comprehension of his age. So far from being "fettered by the decisions of men of old," it was his hand that valiantly essayed to strike the fetters of bigotry and prejudice from the necks of his countrymen. But whilst declining to be bound by the ideas and the standards of others, he was not blind to the danger of liberty degenerating into license. The new fetters, therefore, that he forged for mankind were those of an iron self-discipline and self-control, unaccompanied, however, by anything in the shape of bodily mortification, a practice which he knew to be at once more showy and less troublesome than the discipline of the mind.

Another charge not infrequently heard is one of a certain repellent coldness of temperament and stiffness of demeanour. The warrant for such a statement is not so readily forthcoming, unless indeed it is to be found in the stiff and repellent style which characterises some translations of his sayings. In the Analects we are told the exact opposite of this. The Master, we read there, was uniformly cheerful in demeanour, and he evidently unbent to quite an unusual extent with his disciples, considering the respect and deference universally shown to age and learning in China. Is it at all conceivable that a man of cold and unlovable temper should have attracted round him hundreds of disciples, with many of whom he was on terms of most intimate intercourse, meeting them not only in the lecture-room, as modern professors meet their classes, but living with them, eating, drinking, sleeping and conversing with them, until all their idiosyncrasies, good or bad, were better known to him than to their own parents? Is it explicable, except on the ground of deep personal affection, that he should have been followed into exile by a faithful band of disciples, not one of whom is known ever to have deserted or turned against him? Is coldness to be predicated of the man who in his old age, for once losing something of his habitual self-control, wept passionately for the death of his dearly loved disciple Yen Hui, and would not be comforted?

But it has been reserved for the latest English translator of the Analects, the Rev. Mr. Jennings, to level some of the worst charges at his head. To begin with, he approvingly quotes, as Legge's final opinion on Confucius, words occurring in the earliest edition of the Chinese Classics to the effect that he is "unable to regard him as a great man," quite heedless of the fact that the following stands in the edition of 1893 (two years before his own translation appeared): "But I must now leave the sage. I hope I have not done him injustice; the more I have studied his character and opinions, the more highly have I come to regard him. He was a very great man, and his influence has been on the whole a great benefit to the Chinese, while his teachings suggest important lessons to ourselves who profess to belong to the school of Christ." This summing-up, though certainly unexpected in view of much that has gone before, does partly atone for the unjust strictures which Dr. Legge felt it necessary to pass on Confucius at an earlier period, though it may require many years entirely to obliterate their effect. What I wish to emphasise at present, however, is the unfairness of quoting an early and presumably crude and ill-considered opinion in preference to the latest and maturest judgment of an authority who at no time can be said to err On the side of over-partiality for his subject.

But this is not all. For after pointing out, truly enough, that Confucius cannot well be blamed for "giving no impulse to religion," inasmuch as he never pretended to make this his aim, Mr. Jennings goes on to pick some holes on his own account, and incontinently falls into exactly the same error that he had previously rebuked in Dr. Legge. "In his reserve about great and important matters, while professing to teach men, he is perhaps most to blame, and in his holding back what was best in the religion of the ancients." What these great and important matters were, is not made very clear, but if, as seems probable, the phrase is simply another way of referring to "the religion of the ancients," it can only be repeated that religion was a subject which he disliked to discuss and certainly did not profess to teach, as is plainly indicated in the Analects. And the reason why he refrained from descanting on such matters was that, knowing nothing of them himself, he felt that he would have been guilty of hypocrisy and fraud had he made a show of instructing others therein. Would that a like candour distinguished some of our own professed teachers of religion!

The last accusation against Confucius is the most reckless of all. "There is," according to Mr. Jennings, "a certain selfishness in his teaching, which had the effect of making those who came under his influence soon feel themselves great and self-satisfied." As only the feeblest of evidence is produced to support this wild statement, it will not be necessary to consider it at any length, though we may ask in passing whether Yen Hui, the disciple who profited most from his Master's teaching and best exemplified it, is depicted as exhibiting this alleged self-satisfaction in a peculiarly noticeable degree. For an answer to this question the reader may be referred to Tsêng Tzŭ's remarks on p. 128.

The truth is, though missionaries and other zealots have long attempted to obscure the fact, that the moral teaching of Confucius is absolutely the purest and least open to the charge of selfishness of any in the world. Its principles are neither utilitarian on the one hand nor religious on the other, that is to say, it is not based on the expectation of profit or happiness to be gained either in this world or in the next (though Confucius doubtless believed that well-being would as a general rule accompany virtuous conduct).