Page:History of Corea, ancient and modern; with description of manners and customs, language and geography (1879).djvu/64

 40 HIENBI. For me earth affords no place of shelter." After which speech his mental strife brought on a vomiting of blood, of which he died. This incident, occurring when the canon of the New Tci&ta- ment was scarcely completed, serves to illustrate the perfection of the Chinese moral system from the most ancient to the present times. The one word " duty '' is the sum and essence thereof; and it is elevated to so high a rank above all other words or things as would delight the heart of the author of but even the smothering of the affections ; and it confines the use of the word " love " to eatables and drinkables. It is cold, steel-hearted, inflexible duty which should rule all human relations, and not the warm, impulsive, beating heart of love. The minister and officer is bound, not to love his prince and country, but to be faithful to his trust ; the child is commanded, not to love his parents, but to yield them reverence and deference. Conjugal and parental relations are on precisely the same footing. This stoical teaching is perfected in the annihila- tion of passion of all kinds, and of warmth of feeling in all degrees Ages of such teaching are, doubtless, the cause of the present Chinese social life, which is perfectly pictured in the case of Bao, where, theoretically, duty to parents is everything, and wife and children count for nothing ; hence the imiversally low ebb of family affection. From the same teaching, too, has sprung the intensely conservative nature of the Chinese; for duty is negative and defensive, while love is positive and aggressive. Hence, it appears to me, the great and characteristic diBference between the forwardness and ever advancing civiliza- tion of those nations which have most thoroughly received the teachings of the religion of love, and the stagnation and conservatism of those which either preach a beautiful but cold duty as the sum of morality, or fail to appropriate, in its simplicity and actively benevolent character, the religion of love. In the general disorder and universal strife which, for scores of years, devastated China^ equally with fsunines from flood.
 * ' Sartor Besartos." This duty not only involves self-abnegation,