So when they say, “Confucius was nobody; there is no evidence that he knew the great secrets”; answer them:—­“Yes, there is.  He knew that supreme secret, how to teach, which is the office of a Teacher:  he knew how to build up the inner life of his disciples; to coax, train, lure the hidden god into manifestation in them.”  And for evidence you can give them this:  Tse Kung—­who, you remember, was always comparing this man with that—­asked which was the better, Shih or Shang. (They were two disciples.) Confucius answered:  “Shih goes too far; Shang not far enough.”  Said Tse Kung (just as you or I would have done):—­ “Then Shih is the better man?”—­“Too far,” replied Confucius, “is not better than not far enough.”—­To my ears there is more occultism in that than in a thousand ethical injunctions.—­Or answered;—­“Whilst thy father and they elder brother are alive, how canst thou do all thou art taught?” Jan Yu said:—­“Shall I do all I am taught?” The Master said:—­“Do all thou art taught.”  Kung-hsi Hua said:  “Yu asked, ‘Shall I do all I am taught?’ and you spoke, Sir, of father and elder brother.  Ch’iu asked, ‘Shall I do all I am taught?’ and you answered:  ’Do all thou art taught.’  I am puzzled, and make bold to ask you, Sir.”  The Master said:—­“Ch’iu is bashful, so I egged him on.  Yu has the pluck of two, so I held him back.”

Think it over!  Think it over!

This though occurs to me:  Was that sadness of his last days caused by the knowledge that the School could not continue after his death; because the one man who might have succeeded him as the Teacher, Yen Huy, was dead?  So far as I know, it did not go on; there was no one to succeed him.  That supreme success, that grand capture of future ages for the Gods, was denied him; or I daresay our own civilization might have been Confucian—­BALANCED —­now.  But short of that—­how sublime a figure he stands!  If he had known that for twenty-five centuries or so he was to shine within the vision of the great unthinking masses of his countrymen as their supreme example; their anchor against the tides of error, against abnormalities, extravagances, unbalance; a bulwark against invading time and decay; a check on every bad emperor, so far as check might be set at all; a central idea to mold the hundred races of Chu Hia into homogeneity; a stay, a prop, a warning against headlong courses at all times of cyclic downtrend;—­if he had known all this, he would, I think, have ordered his life precisely as he did.  Is there no strength implied, as of the Universal, and not of any personal, will, however titanic, in the fact that moment after moment, day after day, year after year, he built up this picture, gave the world this wonderful assurance of a man?  In his omissions, no less than in his fulfilments.  He taught,—­so far as we know,—­nothing but what the common mind might easily accept; nothing to miss the mark of the intelligence of dull Li or Ching toiling in