Missionary writers have cast it at him, that were of old he had preached against rebellion, now he was willing enough to “have rebels for his patrons";—­“adversity had not stiffened his back, but had made him pliable.”  Which shows how blind such minds are to real greatness.  “They have nothing to draw with, and this well is deep.”  He sought no “patrons,” now or at another time; but tools with which to work for the redemption of China; and he was prepared to find them anywhere, and take what came to hand.  His keynote was duty. The world went on snubbing, ignoring, insulting, traducing, and persecuting him; and he went on with the performance of his duty;—­rather, with the more difficult task of searching for the duty he was to perform.  This resorting to rebels, like that conversing with Nantse, shows him clearly not the formalist and slave of conventions he has been called, but a man of highest moral courage.  What he stood for was not forms, conventions, reules, proprieties, or anything of the sort; but the liens of least resistance in his high endeavor to lift the world:  lines of least resistance; middle lines; common sense.—­As ususal, there was nothing to be done with the Duke of Ts’ae.

Wandering from state to state, he came on recluses in a field by the river, and sent Tse Lu forward to ask one of them the way to the ford.  Said the hermit:—­“You follow one who withdraws from court to court; it would be better to withdraw from the world altogether.”—­“What!” said Confucius when it was told him; “shall I not associate with mankind?  If I do not associate with mankind, with whom shall I associate?”

In which answer lies a great key to Confucianism; turn it once or twice, and you get to the import of his real teaching.  He never would follow the individual soul into its secrecies; he was concerned with man only as a fragment of humanity.  He was concerned with man as humanity.  All that the West calls (personal) religion he disliked intensely.  Any desire or scheme to save your own soul; any right-doing for the sake of a reward, either here or hereafter, he would have bluntly called wrong-doing, anti-social and selfish. (I am quoting in substance from Dr. Lionel Giles.) He tempted no one with hopes of heaven; frightened none with threats of hell.  It seemed to him that he could make a higher and nobler appeal,—­could strike much more forcibly at the root of evil (which is selfishness), by saying nothing about rewards and punishments at all.  The one inducement to virtue that he offered was this:  By doing right, you lead the world into right-doing.  He was justified in saying that Man is divine; because this divine appeal of his was effective; not like the West’s favorite appeal to fear, selfish desire, and the brutal side of our nature.  “Do right to escape a whipping, or a hanging, or hell-fire,” says Christendom; and the nations reared on that doctrine have risen and fallen, risen and fallen; a mad riot