Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/160

 classes. It came to her strengthened and supplemented by the genius of Mencius, and in some respects it supplied an evident want. Shintō, providing no moral code and relying solely on the promptings of conscience for ethical guidance, was too much of an abstraction to satisfy the ordinary mind. Confucianism, as elaborated by Mencius, offered a system of morals avowedly based on inductive sanctions yet evidently endorsed by the lessons of experience. To a profound belief in the innate goodness of human nature, it added plain expositions of the four fundamental virtues, — benevolence, righteousness, propriety, and wisdom. It taught that the first aim of administration should be the material good of the people; the second, their education. It indicated divine ordination in human affairs, and defined death in the discharge of duty as compliance with that ordination, a disgraceful death as a departure from it; which canon secured implicit obedience from the Japanese in every age. It bade men regard suffering and misfortune as Heaven's instruments for stimulating the mind, bracing the heart, and compensating defects, — a precept to which the Japanese owed much of their stoicism in adversity and their cheerfulness in poverty. It defined society as a compound of five relationships, — sovereign and subject, husband and wife, father and son, elder brother and younger brother, friend and friend, — the first four linked together by the principle of righteous and