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264 them, we must pronounce the latter misleading in the extreme. Men are charged with who were not guilty of it, and base s are related as if they had been natural s. Villains, over whose fate the reader rejoices, are put down as victims of vile, and those who dealt with them as he would have been glad to do are subjected to horrible s without one word of sympathy. Ignoring, concealing, and misrepresenting are the characteristics of the Spring and Autumn. And yet this work is the model for all in. The want of harmony between the facts and the statements about them is patent to all scholars, and it is the knowledge of this, unacknowledged to themselves, which has made the literati, down to the present day, labour with an astonishing amount of fruitless ingenuity and learning to find in individual words, and the turn of every sentence, some mysterious indication of praise or blame. But the majority of them will admit no flaw in the or in his annals. His example in the has been very injurious to. One almost wishes that reasons could be found for denying its authenticity. Confucius said that &ldquo;by the Spring and Autumn men would know him and men would condemn him.&rdquo; It certainly obliges us to make a large deduction from our estimate of his character and of the beneficial influence which he has exerted. The examination of his labours does not on the whole increase our appreciation of him. We get a higher idea of the man from the accounts which his s have given us of his intercourse and conversations with them, and the attempts which they made to present his teachings in some systematic form. If he could not arrest the progress of disorder in, nor throw out which should be helpful in guiding it to a better state under some new al system, he gave important lessons for the formation of individual character, and the manner in which the duties in the relations of  should be discharged. Foremost among these we must rank his distinct enunciation of &ldquo;the golden rule,&rdquo; deduced by him from his study of 's. Several times he gave that rule in express words:—&ldquo;What you do not like when done to yourself do not do to others.&rdquo; The peculiar nature of the enabled him to express this rule by one character, which for want of a better term we may translate in by &ldquo;reciprocity.&rdquo; When the ideagram is looked at, it tells its meaning to the eye,—&ldquo;a thing seen weightier than a thing heard.&rdquo; It is composed of two other characters, one denoting &ldquo;heart,&rdquo; and the other—itself composite—denoting &ldquo;as.&rdquo; Tze-kung once asked if there were any one word which would serve as a rule of practice for all one's life, and the master replied, yes, naming this character (undefined, shu), the &ldquo;as heart,&rdquo; my heart, that is, in sympathy with yours; and then he added his usual explanation of it, which has been given above. It has been said that he only gave the rule in a negative form, but he understood it also in its positive and most comprehensive force, and deplored, on one occasion at least, that he had not himself always attained to taking the initiative in doing to others as he would have them do to him. Another valuable contribution to and science was the way in which he inculcated the power of example, and the necessity of benevolence and righteousness in all who were in authority. 1200 s before he was born, an ancient hero and king had proclaimed in : &ldquo;The great has conferred on the people a, compliance with which would show their nature invariably right. To cause them tranquilly to pursue the course which it indicates is the of the .&rdquo; Confucius knew the utterance well; and he carried out the principle of it, and insisted on its application in all the relations of. He taught emphatically that a bad man was not fit to rule. As a father or a, he might wield the instruments of authority, and punish the transgressors of his s, but no forth-putting of force would countervail the influence of his example. On the other hand, it only needed in the higher position to secure it in the lower. This latter side of his teaching is far from being complete and correct, but the former has, no doubt, been a check on the &ldquo;powers that be,&rdquo; both in the and the  ever since Confucius became the acknowledged  of. It has operated both as a restraint upon evil, and a stimulus to good.

A few of his more characteristic sayings may here be given, the pith and point of which attest his discrimination of character, and show the tendencies of his views:—

1em 1em 1em 1em 1em 1em 1em 1em

Sententious sayings like these have gone far to form the ordinary character. Hundreds of thousands of the literati can repeat every sentence in the classical s; the masses of the people have scores of the Confucian maxims, and little else of an, in their memories,—and with a beneficial result.

Confucius laid no claim, it has been seen, to s. Twice or thrice he did vaguely intimate that he had a mission from undefined, and that until it was accomplished he was safe against all attempts to injure him; but his teachings were singularly devoid of reference to anything but what was seen and temporal. as he is, and the duties belonging to him in, were all that he concerned himself about. 's nature was from ; the harmonious acting out of it was obedience to the will of ; and the violation of it was disobedience. But in affirming this, there was a striking difference between his language and that of his own ancient models. In the King the references to the are abundant; there is an exulting awful recognition of Him as the almighty personal Ruler, who orders the course of  and providence. With Confucius the vague, impersonal term, undefined, took the place of the divine name. There is no glow of in any of his sentiments. He thought that it was better that should not occupy themselves with anything but themselves. There were, we are told in the Analects, four things of which he seldom spoke—extraordinary things, feats of strength,, and. Whatever the institutions of undefined prescribed about the s to be paid to the s of the departed, and to other s, he performed reverently, up to the letter; but at the same time, when one of the s of undefined asked him what constituted, he replied: &ldquo;To give one's self earnestly to the duties due to , and while respecting , to keep aloof from them,—that may be called wisdom.&rdquo; But what belief underlay the practice, as ancient as the first foot-prints of in, of  to the s of the departed? Confucius would not say. There 