or a good action is a patent of
nobility, which does not reach forward to one's children, but backward to
one's parents. This is the bright side of Chinese life; the dark side is
the fearful ennui, the moral death, which falls on a people among whom
there are no such things as hope, expectation, or the sense of progress.
Hence the habit of suicide among this people, indicating their small hold
on life. In every Chinese drama there are two or three suicides. A soldier
will commit suicide rather than go into battle. If you displease a
Chinaman, he will resent the offence by killing himself on your doorstep,
hoping thus to give you some inconvenience. Such are the merits and such
the defects of the system of Confucius.

The doctrine of Zoroaster and of the Zend Avesta is far nobler. Its
central thought is that each man is a soldier, bound to battle for good
against evil. The world, at the present time, is the scene of a great
warfare between the hosts of light and those of darkness. Every man who
thinks purely, speaks purely, and acts purely is a servant of Ormazd, the
king of light, and thereby helps on his cause. The result of this doctrine
was that wonderful Persian empire, which astonished the world for
centuries by its brilliant successes; and the virtue and intelligence of
the Parsees of the present time, the only representatives in the world of
that venerable religion. The one thing lacking to the system is unity. It
lives in perpetual conflict. Its virtues are all the virtues of a soldier.
Its defects and merits are, both, the polar opposites of those of China.
If the everlasting peace of China tends to moral stagnation and death, the
perpetual struggle and conflict of Persia tends to exhaustion. The Persian
empire rushed through a short career of flame to its tomb; the Chinese
empire vegetates, unchanged, through a myriad of years.

* * * * *

If Brahmanism and Buddhism occupy the opposite poles of the same axis of
thought,--if the system of Confucius stands opposed, on another axis, to
that of Zoroaster,--we find a third development of like polar antagonisms
in the systems of ancient Egypt and Greece. Egypt stands for Nature;
Greece for Man. Inscrutable as is the mystery of that Sphinx of the Nile,
the old religion of Egypt, we can yet trace some phases of its secret. Its
reverence for organization appears in the practice of embalming. The
bodies of men and of animals seemed to it