is the fearful ennui, the moral death, which falls on a people among whom there are no such things as hope, expectation, or the sense of progress.  Hence the habit of suicide among this people, indicating their small hold on life.  In every Chinese drama there are two or three suicides.  A soldier will commit suicide rather than go into battle.  If you displease a Chinaman, he will resent the offence by killing himself on your doorstep, hoping thus to give you some inconvenience.  Such are the merits and such the defects of the system of Confucius.

The doctrine of Zoroaster and of the Zend Avesta is far nobler.  Its central thought is that each man is a soldier, bound to battle for good against evil.  The world, at the present time, is the scene of a great warfare between the hosts of light and those of darkness.  Every man who thinks purely, speaks purely, and acts purely is a servant of Ormazd, the king of light, and thereby helps on his cause.  The result of this doctrine was that wonderful Persian empire, which astonished the world for centuries by its brilliant successes; and the virtue and intelligence of the Parsees of the present time, the only representatives in the world of that venerable religion.  The one thing lacking to the system is unity.  It lives in perpetual conflict.  Its virtues are all the virtues of a soldier.  Its defects and merits are, both, the polar opposites of those of China.  If the everlasting peace of China tends to moral stagnation and death, the perpetual struggle and conflict of Persia tends to exhaustion.  The Persian empire rushed through a short career of flame to its tomb; the Chinese empire vegetates, unchanged, through a myriad of years.

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If Brahmanism and Buddhism occupy the opposite poles of the same axis of thought,—­if the system of Confucius stands opposed, on another axis, to that of Zoroaster,—­we find a third development of like polar antagonisms in the systems of ancient Egypt and Greece.  Egypt stands for Nature; Greece for Man.  Inscrutable as is the mystery of that Sphinx of the Nile, the old religion of Egypt, we can yet trace some phases of its secret.  Its reverence for organization appears in the practice of embalming.  The bodies of men and of animals seemed to it to be divine.  Even vegetable organization had something sacred in it:  “O holy nation,” said the Roman satirist, “whose gods grow in gardens!” That plastic force of nature which appears in organic life and growth made up, in various forms, as we shall see in the proper place, the Egyptian Pantheon.  The life-force of nature became divided into the three groups of gods, the highest of which represented its largest generalizations.  Kneph, Neith, Sevech, Pascht, are symbols, according to Lepsius, of the World-Spirit, the World-Matter, Space and Time.  Each circle of the gods shows us some working of the mysterious powers of nature, and of its occult laws.  But when we come to Greece, these personified laws turn into men.  Everything in the Greek Pantheon is human.  All human tendencies appear transfigured into glowing forms of light on Mount Olympus.  The gods of Egypt are powers and laws; those of Greece are persons.