great teachers lived in an atmosphere of the supernatural.
They spoke with the authority of inspired prophets. They brought the
unseen world close to the minds of their disciples. They spoke
positively of immortality, of reward or punishment beyond the grave. The
present life they despised, the future was to them everything in its
promised satisfaction. The teachings of Confucius were of a very
different sort. Throughout his whole writings he has not even mentioned
the name of God. He declined to discuss the question of immortality.
When he was asked about spiritual beings, he remarked, "If we cannot
even know men, how can we know spirits?"

Yet this was the man the impress of whose teaching has formed the
national character of five hundred millions of people. A temple to
Confucius stands to this day in every town and village of China. His
precepts are committed to memory by every child from the tenderest age,
and each year at the royal university at Pekin the Emperor holds a
festival in honor of the illustrious teacher.

The influence of Confucius springs, first of all, from the narrowness
and definiteness of his doctrine. He was no transcendentalist, and never
meddled with supramundane things. His teaching was of the earth, earthy;
it dealt entirely with the common relations of life, and the Golden Rule
he must necessarily have stumbled upon, as the most obvious canon of his
system. He strikes us as being the great Stoic of the East, for he
believed that virtue was based on knowledge, knowledge of a man's own
heart, and knowledge of human-kind. There is a pathetic resemblance
between the accounts given of the death of Confucius and the death of
Zeno. Both died almost without warning in dreary hopelessness, without
the ministrations of either love or religion. This may be a mere
coincidence, but the lives and teachings of both men must have led them
to look with indifference upon such an end. For Confucius in his
teaching treated only of man's life on earth, and seems to have had no
ideas with regard to the human lot after death; if he had any ideas he
preserved an inscrutable silence about them. As a moralist he prescribed
the duties of the king and of the father, and advocated the cultivation
by the individual man of that rest or apathy of mind which resembles so
much the disposition aimed at by the Greek and Roman Stoic. Even as a
moralist, he seems to have sacrificed the ideal to the practical, and
his loose noti