Page:The Chinese Repository - Volume 01.djvu/312

 duty, is filial piety; children are to practice it towards their parents, and subjects towards their monarch and those who represent him. The ancient Chinese never acknowledged a system of religion as a preservative of social morality, and to be denoted by any kind of worship."

This extract, which we have made from the writings of a learned French sinologue, is a very befitting introduction to the remarks we propose to make on the politico-moral work, the title of which stands at the head of this article. Among all the modern standard works of the Chinese there is no one which holds a higher rank in their estimation, than the Sacred Edict. Though it is emphatically true that the Chinese rulers and teachers, like their brethren in western Asia, in other times, "say and do not," still it is desirable to know what they do teach. A succinct account of the sacred edict will, we think, go far to supply this desideratum.

The sixteen maxims were written by Kang-he, the second, and the most learned, beloved, and renowned emperor of the present dynasty, near the close of his reign. This ended A.D. 1723, when he was succeeded by his son, the emperor Yung-ching, who published the amplification of his father's maxims, in the second year of his reign. Wang Yew-po, superintendent of the salt revenue, in the province of Shense, was the mandarin who wrote the paraphrase; but at what time does not appear, either in the translation, or the copies of the original which are now before us.

By a national statute it is required, that the sacred edict be proclaimed throughout the empire, by the local officers, on the first and fifteenth of every moon. The manner of doing this is thus described in the translator's preface. "Early on