mes. He taught men also to regard each other as brethren, and even the
golden rule, in its negative if not its positive form, is to be found in
his writings.

Curiously enough, this teacher of reverence was distinguished by a
remarkable lump on the top of his head, where the phrenologists have
placed the organ of veneration.[13] Rooted in his organization, and
strengthened by all his convictions, this element of adoration seemed to
him the crown of the whole moral nature of man. But, while full of
veneration, he seems to have been deficient in the sense of spiritual
things. A personal God was unknown to him; so that his worship was
directed, not to God, but to antiquity, to ancestors, to propriety and
usage, to the state as father and mother of its subjects, to the ruler as
in the place of authority. Perfectly sincere, deeply and absolutely
assured of all that he knew, he said nothing he did not believe. His power
came not only from the depth and clearness of his convictions, but from
the absolute honesty of his soul.

Lao-tse, for twenty-eight years his contemporary, founder of one of the
three existing religions of China,--Tao-ism,--was a man of perhaps equal
intelligence. But he was chiefly a thinker; he made no attempt to elevate
the people; his purpose was to repress the passions, and to preserve the
soul in a perfect equanimity. He was the Zeno of the East, founder of a
Chinese stoicism. With him virtue is sure of its reward; everything is
arranged by a fixed law. His disciples afterwards added to his system a
thaumaturgic element and an invocation of departed spirits, so that now it
resembles our modern Spiritism; but the original doctrine of Lao-tse was
rationalism in philosophy and stoicism in morals. Confucius is said, in a
Chinese work, to have visited him, and to have frankly confessed his
inability to understand him. "I know how birds fly, how fishes swim, how
animals run. The bird may be shot, the fish hooked, and the beast snared.
But there is the dragon. I cannot tell how he mounts in the air, and soars
to heaven. To-day I have seen the dragon."

But the modest man, who lived for others, has far surpassed in his
influence this dragon of intelligence. It certainly increases our hope for
man, when we see how these qualities of perfect honesty, good sense,
generous devotion to the public good, and fidelity to the last in
adherence to his work, have made Confucius during twenty-three centuries
the daily te