the rice-field;—­nor yet too paltry for the notice of the Hwangti on the Dragon Throne.  Laotse had come in the spirit of Plenydd the Light-bringer; in the spirit of Alawn, to raise up presently sweet profusions of song.  He illuminated the inner worlds; his was the urge that should again and again, especially later when reinforced by Buddhism, prick up the Black-haired People to heights of insight and spiritual achievement.—­But the cycles of insight and spiritual achievement, these too, must always run their course and fall away; there is no year when it is always Spring.  Dark moments and seasons come; and the Spirit becomes hidden; and what you need most is not illumination,—­which you cannot get; or if you could, it would be hell, and not heaven, that would be illuminated for you; not a spur to action,—­for as things are constituted, any spur at such a time would drive you to wrong and exorbitant action:—­what you need is not these, but simply stability to hold on; simply the habit of propriety, the power to go on at least following harmless conventions and doing harmless things; not striking out new lines for yourself, which would certainly be wrong lines, but following as placidly as may be lines that were laid down for you, or that you yourself laid down, in more righteous and more luminous times.  A strong government, however tyrannical, is better than an anarchy in which the fiend in every man is let loose to run amuck.  Under the tyranny, yes, the aspiring man will find himself hindered and thwarted; but under the anarchy, since man is no less hell than heaven, the gates of hell will be opened, and the Soul, normally speaking, can only retire and wait for better times:—­unless it be the Soul of a Confucius, it can but wait till Karma with ruthless hands has put down the anarchy and cleared things up.  Unless it be the Soul of a Confucius; and even Such a One is bound to be a failure in his own day.

But see what he did.  The gates of hell were swung wide, and for the time being, not the hosts of the Seraphim and Cherubim,—­not the armed Bodhisatvas and Dhyanis,—­could have forced them back on their hinges:  “the ripple of effect,” we read, “thou shalt let run its course.”  But in the ideal world he erected a barrier against them.  He set up a colossal statue with arms outthrown to bar the egress; the statue of Confucius preaching the Balanced Life.  With time it materialized, so to say, and fell into place.  You can never certainly stop the gates of hell,—­in this stage of our evolution.  But perhaps as nearly as it can be done, he did it.  Rome fell, and Christendom made a mess of things; it has never yet achieved that union which is the first condition of true civilization.  But China, older than Rome, despite her sins and vicissitudes, has made a shift to stand.  I shall come to comparing the two histories presently; then you will see.  When the pralaya came on her, and the forces of life all went elsewhere—­as they do and must