ons
reared on that doctrine have risen and fallen, risen and fallen;
a mad riot of people struggling into life, and toppling back into
death in a season; so that future ages and the far reaches of
history will hardly remember their names, too lightly graven upon
time. But China, nourished on this divine appeal, however far
she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood.
In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything;
the only lever that lifts.--There is that _li,_--that inevitable
rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost _when there is
the balance_ and duty is being done, and flows outward healing
and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;--let
that harmony of heaven play through you, and you are bringing
mankind to virtue; you are pouting cleansing currents into the
world. How little of the tortuosity of metaphysics is here;--but
what grand efficacity of super-ethics! You remember what _Light
on the Path_ says about the man who is a link between the noise
of the market-place and the silence of the snow-capped Himalayas;
and what it says about the danger of seeking to sow good karma
for oneself,--how the man that does so will only be sowing the
giant weed of selfhood. In those two passages you find the
essence of Confucianism and the wisdom and genius of Confucius.
It is as simple as A B C; and yet behind it lie all the truths
of metaphysics and philosophy. He seized upon the pearl
of Theosophic thought, the cream of all metaphysics, where
metaphysics passes into action,--and threw his strength into
insisting on that: Pursue virtue because it is virtue, and that
you may (as you will,--it is the only way you can) bring the
world to virtue; or negatively, in the words of _Light on the
Path:_ "Abstain (from vice) because it is right to abstain--not
that yourself shall be kept clean." And now to travel back
into the thought behind, that you may see if Confucius was a
materialist; whether or not he believed in the Soul;--and that
if he was not a great original thinker, at least he commanded the
ends of all great, true and original thinking. Man, he says, is
naturally good. That is, collectively. _Man_ is divine and
immortal; only _men_ are mortal and erring. Were there a true
brotherhood of mankind established, a proper relation of the
parts to the whole and to each other,--you would have no
difficulty with what is evil in yourself. The lower nature