And everywhere, in all those foreign realms, he had his missionaries preaching the Good Law.  And some of these came to Palestine, and founded there for him an order at Nazareth called the Essenes; in which, some century or two later, a man rose to teach the Good Law—­by name, Jesus of Nazareth.—­Now consider the prestige, the moral influence, of a king who might keep his agents, unmolested, carrying out his will, right across Asia, in Syria, Greece, Macedonia, and Egypt; the king of a great, free, and mighty people, who, if he had cared to, might have marched out world-conquering; but who preferred that his conquests should be the conquests of duty.  Devanampiya Piadasi:  the Gracious of Mien, the Beloved of the Gods:  an Adept King like them of old time, strayed somehow into the scope and vision of history.

VIII.  THE BLACK-HAIRED PEOPLE

Greece shone between 478 and 348,—­to give the thirteen decades of her greatest spiritual brightness.  Then came India in 321; we lose sight of her after the death of Asoka in the two-thirties, but know the Maurya Empire lasted its thirteen decades (and six years) until 185.  Then China flamed up brilliantly under the Western House of Han from 194 to 64;—­at which time, however, we shall not arrive for a few weeks yet.

Between these three national epochs there is this difference:  the Greek Age came late in its manvantara; which opened (as I guess), roughly speaking, some three hundred and ninety years before:—­three times thirteen decades, with room for three national flowerings in Europe—­among what peoples, who can say?—­ We cannot tell where in its manvantara the Indian Age may have come:  whether near the beginning, or at the middle.  But in China we are on firm ground, and the firmest of all.  A manvantara, a fifteen-century cycle, began in the two-forties B. C.; this Age of Han was its first blossom and splendid epoch; and we need feel no surprise that it was not followed by a night immediately, but only by a twilight and slight dimming of the glories for about thirteen decades again, and then the full brilliance of another day.  Such things are proper to peoples new-born after their long pralaya; and can hardly happen, one would say, after the morning of the manvantara has passed.  Thus in our own European cycle, Italy the first-born was in full creative energy from about 1240 to 1500:  twenty-six decades;—­whereas the nations that have held hegemony since have had to be content each with its thirteen.

And now to take bird’s-eye views of China as a whole; and to be at pains to discover what relation she bears, historically, to ourselves and the rest of the globe.

Do you remernber how Abraham haggled with the Lord over the Cities of the Plain?  Yahveh was for destroying them off hand for their manifold sins and iniquities; but Abraham argued and bargained and brought him down till if peradventure there should be found ten righteous in Sodom and Gomorrah, the Lord promised he would spare them.  But ten righteous there were not, nor nothing near; so the Cities of the Plain went down.