re and
beautiful was their light. The vault of heaven was spread out like a
curtain, and the square earth supported all on it, and all creatures
were happy. I, thy servant, presume reverently to thank Thee." Farther
on he says: "All the numerous tribes of animated beings are indebted to
Thy favor for their being. Men and creatures are emparadised in Thy
love. All living things are indebted to Thy goodness. But who knows
whence his blessings come to him? It is Thou, O Lord! who art the
parent of all things."[141]

Surely this prayer humbly offered by a monarch would not be greatly out
of place among the Psalms of David. Its description of the primeval
chaos strikingly resembles that which I have quoted from the Rig Veda,
and both resemble that of the Mosaic record. If the language used does
not present the clear conception of one God, the Creator and the
Upholder of all things, and a supreme and personal Sovereign over kings
and even "gods," then language has no meaning. The monotheistic
conception of the second petition is as distinct from the polytheism of
the first, as any prayer to Jehovah is from a Roman Catholic's prayer
for the intercession of the saints; and there is no stronger argument in
the one case against monotheism than in the other. Dr. Legge asserts
that both in the Shu-king and in the Shiking, "Te," or "Shangte,"
appears as a personal being ruling in heaven and in earth, the author of
man's moral nature, the governor among the nations, the rewarder of the
good and the punisher of the evil.[142] There are proofs that Confucius,
though in his position with respect to God he fell short of the doctrine
of the ancient sages, yet believed in the existence of Shangte as a
personal being. When in old age he had finished his writings, he laid
them on an altar upon a certain hill-top, and kneeling before the altar
he returned thanks that he had been spared to complete his work.[143]
Max Mueller says of him: "It is clear from many passages that with
Confucius, Tien, or the Spirit of Heaven, was the supreme deity, and
that he looked upon the other gods of the people--the spirits of the
air, the mountains, and the rivers,[144] and the spirits of the
departed, very much with the same feeling with which Socrates regarded
the mythological deities of Greece."[145]

But there remains to this day a remarkable evidence of the worship of
the supreme God, Shangte, as he was worshipped in the days of the
Emperor Shun, 2356