's voice, with a timbre in it that
belongs to the Lords of Wisdom. And to me, despite Lao Lai
and Tan the Grand Historiographer, it is the voice of an
old man in the seclusion of the Royal Library: a happy little
bald-headed straggly-bearded old man anxious to keep himself
unknown and unapplauded; it is a voice attuned to quietness,
and to mental reactions from the thunder of the armies, the
drums and tramplings and fuss and insolence of his day. I
thoroughly believe in the old man in the Royal Library, and
the riding away on oxback at last into the west,--where was
Si Wang Mu's Faery Garden, and the Gobi Desert, with sundry
oases therein whereof we have heard. I can hear that voice,
with childlike wonder in it, and Adept-like seriousness, and
childlike and Adept-like laughter not far behind, in such sayings
as these: "Tao is like the emptiness of a vessel; and the use
of it, we may say, must be free from all self-sufficiency. How
deep and mysterious it is, as if it were the author of all things!
We should make our sharpness blunt, and unravel the complications
of things. . . . How still and clear is Tao, a phantasm with
the semblance of permanence! I do not know whose son it is.
It might appear to have been before God."

We see in Christendom the effects of belief in a personal God,
and also the inefficacy of mere ethics. Believers make their God
in their own image, and nourish their personalities imitating an
imitation of themselves. At the best of times they take their
New Testament ethics, distil from these every virtue and
excellent quality, and posit the result as the characteristics of
their Deity:--the result, plus a selfhood; and therefore the
great delusion and heresy, Separateness, is the link that binds
the whole together. It is after all but a swollen personality;
and whether you swell your personalitv with virtues or vices, the
result is an offense. There is a bridge, razor-edged, between
earth and heaven; and you can never carry that load across it.
Laotse, supremely ethical in effect, had a cordial detestation--
take this gingerly!--of un-re-enforced ethics. "When the great
Tao is lost," says he, "men follow after charity and duty to
one's neighbor." Again: "When Tao is lost, virtue takes its
place. When virtue is lost, benevolence succeeds to it. When
benevolence is lost, justice ensues. When justice is lost, then
we have expediency." He does not mean, of course, that these
things are bad; b