vance of his age. He fell into
disfavour at court, and was dismissed to a provincial post; and although
he was soon recalled, he retired into private life, shortly afterwards
to die, but not before he had seen the whole of his policy reversed.

His career stands out in marked contrast with that of the great
statesman and philosopher, Chu Hsi (pronounced _Choo Shee_), who
flourished A.D. 1130-1200. His literary output was enormous and his
official career successful; but his chief title to fame rests upon his
merits as a commentator on the Confucian Canon. As has been already
stated, he introduced interpretations either wholly or partly at
variance with those which had been put forth by the scholars of the
Han dynasty, and hitherto received as infallible, thus modifying to a
certain extent the prevailing standard of political and social morality.
His guiding principle was merely one of consistency. He refused to
interpret words in a given passage in one sense, and the same words
occurring elsewhere in another sense. The effect of this apparently
obvious method was magical; and from that date the teachings of
Confucius have been universally understood in the way in which Chu Hsi
said they ought to be understood.

To his influence also must be traced the spirit of materialism which
is so widely spread among educated Chinese. The God in whom Confucius
believed, but whom, as will be seen later on, he can scarcely be said
to have "taught," was a passive rather than an active God, and may be
compared with the God of the Psalms. He was a personal God, as we know
from the ancient character by which He was designated in the written
language of early ages, that character being a rude picture of a
man. This view was entirely set aside by Chu Hsi, who declared in the
plainest terms that the Chinese word for God meant nothing more than
"abstract right;" in other words, God was a principle. It is impossible
to admit such a proposition, which was based on sentiment and not
on sound reasoning. Chu Hsi was emphatically not a man of religious
temperament, and belief in the supernatural was distasteful to him;
he was for a short time under the spell of Buddhism, but threw that
religion over for the orthodoxy of Confucianism. He was, therefore,
anxious to exclude the supernatural altogether from the revised scheme
of moral conduct which he was deducing from the Confucian Canon, and his
interpretation of the word "God" has been blindly accep