Contrasting the efforts of that age and this, we may say that then, organization, such as we have now, was lacking.  Confucius did not come as the official successor of Laotse; Laotse, probably, had had no organized school that he could hand over to Confucius.  He had taught, and his influence had gone far and wide, affecting the thought of the age; but he had had no trained and pledged body of students to whom he could say:  ’Follow this man when I am gone; he is my worthy successor.’—­ All of which will be laughed at:  I firmly believe, however, that it is an accurate estimate of things.  When you come to think of it, it was by the narrowest margine that H. P. Blavatsky, through Mr. Judge—­and his heroism and wisdom alone to be thanked for it!—­had anything beyond the influence of her ideas and revelation to hand on to Katherine Tingley.  In the way of an organization, I mean.  Very few among her disciples had come to have any glimmering of what discipleship means, or were prepared to follow her accredited successors.

And Confucius, in his turn, had no established center for his school; it was a thing that wandered the world with him, and ceased, as in organization (however hazy) to exist when he died.  Nothing remained, then, of either Teacher for posterity except the ideas and example.  And yet I have hinted, and shall try to show, that tremendous results for good followed:  that the whole course of history was turned in an upward direction.  You may draw what inferences you will.  The matter is profoundly significant.

Thirteen decades after the death of Confucius, Plato died in Greece; and about that time two men arose in China to carry forward, bring down, and be the expositors of, the work of the two great Teachers of the sixth and seventh centuries.  These were Chwangtse for Taoism, and Mangtse or Mencius for Confucius:  the one, the channel through which spiritual thought flowed to the quickening of the Chinese imagination; the other, the man who converted the spiritual thought of Confucius into the Chinese Constitution.  Alas! they were at loggerheads:  a wide breach between the two schools of thought had come to be by their time; or perhaps it was they who created it.  We shall arrive at them next week; tonight, to introduce you to Liehtse, a Taoist teacher who came sometime between Laotse and Chwangtse;—­perhaps in the last quarter of the fifth century, when Socrates was active in Greece.

Professor De Groot, of Holland, speaks boldly of Confucius as a Taoist; and though I dislike many of this learned Dutchman’s ideas, this one is excellent.  His thesis is that Laotse was no more an innovator than Confucius; that both but gave a new impulse to teachings as old as the race.  Before Laotse there had been a Teacher Quan, a statesman-philosopher of the seventh century, who had also taught the Tao.  The immemorial Chinese idea had been that the Universe is made of the interplay of two forces, Yang