ted nor denied a
Supreme God. His worship and prayer did not necessarily imply such a
faith. It was the prayer of reverence addressed to some sacred,
mysterious, unknown power, above and behind all visible things. What that
power was, he, with his supreme candor, did not venture to intimate. But
in the She-King a personal God is addressed. The oldest books recognize a
Divine person. They teach that there is one Supreme Being, who is
omnipresent, who sees all things, and has an intelligence which nothing
can escape,--that he wishes men to live together in peace and brotherhood.
He commands not only right actions, but pure desires and thoughts, that we
should watch all our behavior, and maintain a grave and majestic demeanor,
"which is like a palace in which virtue resides"; but especially that we
should guard the tongue. "For a blemish may be taken out of a diamond by
carefully polishing it; but, if your words have the least blemish, there
is no way to efface that." "Humility is the solid foundation of all the
virtues." "To acknowledge one's incapacity is the way to be soon prepared
to teach others; for from the moment that a man is no longer full of
himself, nor puffed up with empty pride, whatever good he learns in the
morning he practices before night." "Heaven penetrates to the bottom of
our hearts, like light into a dark chamber. We must conform ourselves to
it, till we are like two instruments of music tamed to the same pitch. We
must join ourselves with it, like two tablets which appear but one. We
must receive its gifts the very moment its hand is open to bestow. Our
irregular passions shut up the door of our souls against God."

Such are the teachings of these Kings, which are unquestionably among the
oldest existing productions of the human mind. In the days of Confucius
they seem to have been nearly forgotten, and their precepts wholly
neglected. Confucius revised them, added his own explanations and
comments, and, as one of the last acts of his life, called his disciples
around him and made a solemn dedication of these books to Heaven. He
erected an altar on which he placed them, adored God, and returned thanks
upon his knees in a humble manner for having had life and health granted
him to finish this undertaking.

Sec. 7. Confucius and Christianity. Character of the Chinese.

It were easy to find defects in the doctrine of Confucius. It has little
to teach of God or immortality. But if the law of Mose