4.  Christianity, being not a system but a life, not a creed or a form, but a spirit, is able to meet all the changing wants of an advancing civilization by new developments and adaptations, constantly feeding the life of man at its roots by fresh supplies of faith in God and faith in man.

Chapter II.

Confucius and the Chinese, or the Prose of Asia.

Sec. 1.  Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization. 
Sec. 2.  Chinese Government based on Education.  Civil-Service Examinations. 
Sec. 3.  Life and Character of Confucius. 
Sec. 4.  Philosophy and subsequent Development of Confucianism. 
Sec. 5.  Lao-tse and Tao-ism. 
Sec. 6.  Religious Character of the “Kings.” 
Sec. 7.  Confucius and Christianity.  Character of the Chinese. 
Sec. 8.  The Tae-ping Insurrection.  NOTE.  The Nestorian Inscription in China

              of the Eighth Century.

Sec. 1.  Peculiarities of Chinese Civilization.

In qualifying the Chinese mind as prosaic, and in calling the writings of Confucius and his successors prose, we intend no disrespect to either.  Prose is as good as poetry.  But we mean to indicate the point of view from which the study of the Chinese teachers should be approached.  Accustomed to regard the East as the land of imagination; reading in our childhood the wild romances of Arabia; passing, in the poetry of Persia, into an atmosphere of tender and entrancing song; then, as we go farther East into India, encountering the vast epics of the Maha-Bharata and the Ramayana;—­we might naturally expect to find in far Cathay a still wilder flight of the Asiatic Muse.  Not at all.  We drop at once from unbridled romance into the most colorless prose.  Another race comes to us, which seems to have no affinity with Asia, as we have been accustomed to think of Asia.  No more aspiration, no flights of fancy, but the worship of order, decency, propriety, and peaceful commonplaces.  As the people, so the priests.  The works of Confucius and his commentators are as level as the valley of their great river, the Yang-tse-kiang, which the tide ascends for four hundred miles.  All in these writings is calm, serious, and moral They assume that all men desire to be made better, and will take the trouble to find out how they can be made so.  It is not thought necessary to entice them into goodness by the attractions of eloquence, the charm of imagery, or the fascinations of a brilliant wit.  These philosophers have a Quaker style, a dress of plain drab, used only for clothing the thought, not at all for its ornament.

And surely we ought not to ask for any other attraction than the subject itself, in order to find interest in China and its teachers.  The Chinese Empire, which contains more than five millions of square miles, or twice the area of the United States, has a population of five hundred millions, or half the number of the human beings inhabiting the globe.  China proper, inhabited by the Chinese, is half as large as Europe, and contains about three hundred and sixty millions of inhabitants.  There are eighteen provinces in China, many of which contain, singly, more inhabitants than some of the great states of Europe.  But on many other accounts this nation is deeply interesting.