And now that he stands before the world a Teacher, we may drop his personal name, K’ung Ch’iu, and call him by the title to which paeans of praise have been swelling through all the ages since:  K’ung Futse, K’ung the Master; latinized, Confucius.  It is a name that conveys to you, perhaps, some associations of priggishness and pedantry:  almost whereever you see him written of you find suggestions of the sort.  Forgo them at once:  they are false utterly.  Missionaries have interpreted him to the West; who have worked hard to show him something less than the Nazarene.  They have set him in a peculiar light; and others have followed them.  Perhaps no writer except and until Dr. Lionel Giles (whose interpretation, both of the man and his doctrine, I shall try to give you), has shown him to us as he was, so that we can understand why he has stood the Naional Hero, the Savior and Ideal Man of all those millions through all these centuries.

We have been told again and again that his teaching was wholly unspiritual; that he knew nothing of the inner worlds; never mentions the Soul, or ‘God’; says no word to lighten for you the “dusk within the Holy of holies.”  He was all for outwardness, they say:  a thorough externalist; a ritualist cold and unmagnetic.—­It is much what his enemies said in his own day; who, and not himself, provide the false-interpreters with their weapons.  But think of the times, and you may understand.  How would the missionaries feel, were Jesus translated to the Chinese as a fine man in some respects—­considering—­but, unfortunately! too fond of the pleasures of the table; “a gluttonous man and a winebibber “?

They were stirring times, indeed; when all boundaries were in flux, and you needed a new atlas three times a year.  Robbers would carve themselves new principalities overnight; kingdoms would arise, and vanish with the waning of a moon.  What would this, or any other country, become, were law, order, the police and every restraining influence made absolutely inefficient?  Were California one state today; a dozen next week; in July six or seven, and next December but a purlieu to Arizona?—­Things, heaven knows, are bad enough as they are; there is no dearth of crime and cheatery.  Still, the police and the legal system do stand between us and red riot and ruin.  In China they did not; the restraints had been crumbling for two or three centuries.  Human nature, broadly speaking, is much of a muchness in all lands and ages:  I warrant if you took the center of this world’s respectability, which I should on the whole put in some suburb of London;—­I warrant that if you relieved Clapham,—­whose crimes, says Kipling very wisely, are ’chaste in Martaban,’—­of police and the Pax Britannica for a hundred years or so, lurid Martaban would have little pre-eminence left to brag about.  The class that now goes up primly and plugly to business in the City day by day would be cutting throats a little; they would be making life quite interesting.  Their descendants, I mean.  It would take time; Mother Grundy would not be disthroned in a day.  But it would come; because men follow the times, and not the Soul; and are good as sheep are, but not as heroes.  So in Chow China.