But the young Confucius knew his history.  He looked back from that confusion to a wise Wu Wang and Duke of Chow; to a Tang the Completer, whose morning bath-tub was inscribed with this motto from The New Way: “If at any time in his life a man can make a new man of himself, why not every morning?” Most of all he looked back to the golden and sinless age of Yao and Shun and Yu, as far removed from him, nearly, as pre-Roman Britain is from us:  he saw them ruling their kingdom as a strong benevolent father rules his house.  In those days men had behaved themselves:  natural virtue had expressed itself in the natural way.  In good manners; in observation of the proprieties, for example.—­In that wild Martaban of Chow China, would not a great gentleman of the old school (who happened also to be a Great Teacher) have seen a virtue in even quiet Claphamism, that we cannot?  It was not the time for Such a One to slight the proprieties and ‘reasonable conventions of life.’  The truth is, the devotion of his disciples has left us minute pictures of the man, so that we see him ... particular as to the clothes he wore; and from this too the West gathers material for its charge of externalism.  Well; and if he accepted the glossy top-hats and black Prince Albert coats;—­only with him they were caps and robes of azure, carnation, yellow, black, or white; this new fashion of wearing red he would have none of:—­I can see nothing in it but this:  the Great Soul had chosen the personality it should incarnate in, with an eye to the completeness of the work it should do; and seventy generations of noble ancestry would protest, even in the matter of clothing, against red riot and ruin and Martaban.

He is made to cite the ‘Superior Man’ as the model of excellence; and that phrase sounds to us detestably priggish.  In the Harvard Classics it is translated (as well as may be) ’true gentleman,’ or ‘princely man’; in which is no priggish ring at all.  Again, he is made to address his disciples as “My Children,” at which, too, we naturally squirm a little:  what he really called them was ‘My boys,’ which sounds natural and affectionate enough.  Supposing the Gospels were translated into Chinese by someone with the gluttonous-man-and-winebibber bias; —­what, I wonder, would he put for Amen, amen lego humin? Not “Verily, verily I say unto you”!

But I must go on with his life.

Things had gone ill in in Lu during his absence:  threee great clan chieftains had stopped fighting among themselves to fight instead against their feudal superior, and Marquis Chao had been exiled to Ts’i.  It touched Confucius directly; his teaching on such matters had been peremptory:  he would ‘rectify names’:  have the prince prince, and the people his subjects:—­he would have law and order in the state, or the natural harmony of things was broken.  As suggested above, he was very much a man of mark in Lu; and a protest from him,—­which