Only once, I think, is he recorded to have spoken of prayer.  He was very ill, and Tse Lu proposed to pray for his recovery.  Said Confucius:  “What precedent is there for that?”—­There was great stuff in that Tse Lu:  a bold warriorlike nature; not very pliable; not too easy to teach, I imagine, but wonderfully paying for any lesson taught and learned.  He figures often as the one who clings to the letter, and misses vision of the spirit of the teaching; so now the Master plays him a little with this as to precedent,—­which weighed always more strongly with Tse Lu than with Confucius.—­“In the Eulogies," said Tse Lu, (it is a lost work), “it is written:  ’We pray to you, O Spirits of Heaven and Earth.”—­“Ah!” said Confucius, “my prayers began long, long ago.”  But he never did pray, in the Western sense.  His life was one great intercession and petition for his people.

As to his love of ritual:  remember that there are ceremonies and ceremonies, some with deep power and meaning.  Those that Confucius upheld came down to him from Adept Teachers of old; and he had an eye to them only as outward signs of a spiritual grace, and means to it.  “Ceremonies indeed!” said he once; “do you think they are a mere matter of silken robes and jade omaments?  Music forsooth!  Can music be a mere thing of drums and bells?”—­Or of harps, lutes, dulcimers, sackbuts, psalteries, and all kinds of instruments, he might have added; all of which, together with all rites, postures, pacings, and offerings, were nothing to him unless channels through which the divine li might be induced to flow.  Yet on his wanderings, by the roadside, in lonely places, he would go through ceremonies with his disciples.  Why?—­Why is an army drilled?  If you go to the root of the matter, it is to make one the consciousness of the individual soldiers.  So Confucius, as I take it, in his ceremonies sought to unify the consciousness of his disciples, that the li might have passage through them.  I say boldly it was a proof of that deep occult knowledge of his,—­which he never talked about.

They asked him once if any single ideogram conveyed the whole law of life.—­“Yes,” he said; and gave them one compounded of two others, which means ’As heart’:—­the missionaries prefer to render it ‘reciprocity.’  His teaching—­out of his own mouth we convict him—­was the Doctrine of the Heart.  He was for the glow in the heart always; not as against, but as the one true cause of, external right action.  But the Heart doctrine cannot be defined in a set of rules and formulae; so he was always urging middle lines, common sense.  That is the explanation of his famous answer when they asked him whether injuries should be repaid with kindness.  What he said amounts to this:  “For goodness sake, use common sense!  I have given you ‘as heart’ for your rule.”—­We know Katherine Tingley’s teaching:  not one of us but has been helped and saved by it a thousand times.  I can only say that, in the light of that, the more you study Confucius, the greater he seems; the more extraordinary the parallelisms you see between her method and his.  Perhaps it is because his method has been so minutely recorded.  We do not find here merely ethical precepts, or expositions of philosophic thought:  what we see is a Teacher guiding and adjusting the lives of his disciples.