The great principles which he taught were chiefly based on family affection and duty.  He taught kings that they were to treat their subjects as children, subjects to respect the kings as parents; and these ideas so penetrated the national mind, that emperors are obliged to seem to govern thus, even if they do not desire it.  Confucius was a teacher of reverence,—­reverence for God, respect for parents, respect and reverence for the past and its legacies, for the great men and great ideas of former times.  He taught men also to regard each other as brethren, and even the golden rule, in its negative if not its positive form, is to be found in his writings.

Curiously enough, this teacher of reverence was distinguished by a remarkable lump on the top of his head, where the phrenologists have placed the organ of veneration.[13] Rooted in his organization, and strengthened by all his convictions, this element of adoration seemed to him the crown of the whole moral nature of man.  But, while full of veneration, he seems to have been deficient in the sense of spiritual things.  A personal God was unknown to him; so that his worship was directed, not to God, but to antiquity, to ancestors, to propriety and usage, to the state as father and mother of its subjects, to the ruler as in the place of authority.  Perfectly sincere, deeply and absolutely assured of all that he knew, he said nothing he did not believe.  His power came not only from the depth and clearness of his convictions, but from the absolute honesty of his soul.

Lao-tse, for twenty-eight years his contemporary, founder of one of the three existing religions of China,—­Tao-ism,—­was a man of perhaps equal intelligence.  But he was chiefly a thinker; he made no attempt to elevate the people; his purpose was to repress the passions, and to preserve the soul in a perfect equanimity.  He was the Zeno of the East, founder of a Chinese stoicism.  With him virtue is sure of its reward; everything is arranged by a fixed law.  His disciples afterwards added to his system a thaumaturgic element and an invocation of departed spirits, so that now it resembles our modern Spiritism; but the original doctrine of Lao-tse was rationalism in philosophy and stoicism in morals.  Confucius is said, in a Chinese work, to have visited him, and to have frankly confessed his inability to understand him.  “I know how birds fly, how fishes swim, how animals run.  The bird may be shot, the fish hooked, and the beast snared.  But there is the dragon.  I cannot tell how he mounts in the air, and soars to heaven.  To-day I have seen the dragon.”

But the modest man, who lived for others, has far surpassed in his influence this dragon of intelligence.  It certainly increases our hope for man, when we see how these qualities of perfect honesty, good sense, generous devotion to the public good, and fidelity to the last in adherence to his work, have made Confucius during twenty-three centuries the daily teacher and guide of a third of the human race.