ed
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 notions
about marriage, his tolerance of concubinage, the slight emphasis
which he lays on the virtue of veracity--of which indeed he does not
seem himself to have been particularly studious in his historic
writings--place him low down in the rank of moralists. Yet he taught
what he felt the people could receive, and the flat mediocrity of his
character and his teachings has been stamped forever upon a people
who, while they are kindly, gentle, forbearing, and full o