of people struggling into life, and toppling back into death in a season; so that future ages and the far reaches of history will hardly remember their names, too lightly graven upon time.  But China, nourished on this divine appeal, however far she may have fallen short of it, has stood, and stood, and stood.  In the last resort, it is the only inducement worth anything; the only lever that lifts.—­There is that li,—­that inevitable rightness and harmony that begins in the innermost when there is the balance and duty is being done, and flows outward healing and preserving and making wholesome all the phases of being;—­let that harmony of heaven play through you, and you are bringing mankind to virtue; you are pouting cleansing currents into the world.  How little of the tortuosity of metaphysics is here;—­but what grand efficacity of super-ethics!  You remember what Light on the Path says about the man who is a link between the noise of the market-place and the silence of the snow-capped Himalayas; and what it says about the danger of seeking to sow good karma for oneself,—­how the man that does so will only be sowing the giant weed of selfhood.  In those two passages you find the essence of Confucianism and the wisdom and genius of Confucius.  It is as simple as A B C; and yet behind it lie all the truths of metaphysics and philosophy.  He seized upon the pearl of Theosophic thought, the cream of all metaphysics, where metaphysics passes into action,—­and threw his strength into insisting on that:  Pursue virtue because it is virtue, and that you may (as you will,—­it is the only way you can) bring the world to virtue; or negatively, in the words of Light on the Path: “Abstain (from vice) because it is right to abstain—­not that yourself shall be kept clean.”  And now to travel back into the thought behind, that you may see if Confucius was a materialist; whether or not he believed in the Soul;—­and that if he was not a great original thinker, at least he commanded the ends of all great, true and original thinking.  Man, he says, is naturally good.  That is, collectively. Man is divine and immortal; only men are mortal and erring.  Were there a true brotherhood of mankind established, a proper relation of the parts to the whole and to each other,—­you would have no difficulty with what is evil in yourself.  The lower nature with its temptations would not appear; the world-old battle with the flesh would be won.  But separate yourself in yourself,—­consider yourself as a selfhood, not as a unit in society;—­and you find, there where you have put yourself, evil to contend with a-plenty.  Virtue inheres in the Brotherhood of Man; vice in the separate personal and individual units.  Virtue is in That which is no man’s possession, but common to all:  namely, the Soul—­though he does not enlarge upon it as that; perhaps never mentions it as the Soul at all;—­vice is in that which each has for himself alone:  the personality.