Page:The Sayings of Lao Tzŭ (Giles, 1904).djvu/17

 undoubtedly the first man to preach the gospel of peace and intelligent inaction, being in this, as in many other respects, far in advance of his age.

In those troublous times, when the land was torn by internecine feuds, and the spirit of militarism was rife, it is not a little remarkable to find him expressing unqualified abhorrence of war, though, to be sure, this was but the logical outcome of his system of quietism. Few can help being struck by the similarity of tone between the sayings of Lao Tzŭ and the Gospel enunciated six centuries later by the Prince of Peace. There are two famous utterances in particular which secure to Lao Tzŭ the glory of having anticipated the lofty morality of the Sermon on the Mount. The cavillers who would rank the Golden Rule of Confucius below that of Christ will find it hard to get over the fact that Lao Tzŭ said, "Requite injury with kindness," and "To the not-good I would be good in order to make them good." It was a hundred and fifty years later that Plato reached the same conclusion in the first book of the Republic.

It is interesting to observe certain points of contact between Lao Tzŭ and the early Greek Philosophers. He may be compared both with Parmenides, who disparaged sense-knowledge and taught the existence of the One as opposed to the Many, and with Heraclitus, whose theory of the identity of contraries recalls some of our Sage's paradoxes. But it is when we come to Plato that the most striking parallels occur. It has not escaped notice that something like the Platonic doctrine of ideas is discoverable in the