and active forces of matter to operate, thy making work went on.  Thou didst produce, O Spirit! the sun and moon and five planets, and pure and beautiful was their light.  The vault of heaven was spread out like a curtain, and the square earth supported all on it, and all creatures were happy.  I, thy servant, presume reverently to thank Thee.”  Farther on he says:  “All the numerous tribes of animated beings are indebted to Thy favor for their being.  Men and creatures are emparadised in Thy love.  All living things are indebted to Thy goodness.  But who knows whence his blessings come to him?  It is Thou, O Lord! who art the parent of all things."[141]

Surely this prayer humbly offered by a monarch would not be greatly out of place among the Psalms of David.  Its description of the primeval chaos strikingly resembles that which I have quoted from the Rig Veda, and both resemble that of the Mosaic record.  If the language used does not present the clear conception of one God, the Creator and the Upholder of all things, and a supreme and personal Sovereign over kings and even “gods,” then language has no meaning.  The monotheistic conception of the second petition is as distinct from the polytheism of the first, as any prayer to Jehovah is from a Roman Catholic’s prayer for the intercession of the saints; and there is no stronger argument in the one case against monotheism than in the other.  Dr. Legge asserts that both in the Shu-king and in the Shiking, “Te,” or “Shangte,” appears as a personal being ruling in heaven and in earth, the author of man’s moral nature, the governor among the nations, the rewarder of the good and the punisher of the evil.[142] There are proofs that Confucius, though in his position with respect to God he fell short of the doctrine of the ancient sages, yet believed in the existence of Shangte as a personal being.  When in old age he had finished his writings, he laid them on an altar upon a certain hill-top, and kneeling before the altar he returned thanks that he had been spared to complete his work.[143] Max Mueller says of him:  “It is clear from many passages that with Confucius, Tien, or the Spirit of Heaven, was the supreme deity, and that he looked upon the other gods of the people—­the spirits of the air, the mountains, and the rivers,[144] and the spirits of the departed, very much with the same feeling with which Socrates regarded the mythological deities of Greece."[145]

But there remains to this day a remarkable evidence of the worship of the supreme God, Shangte, as he was worshipped in the days of the Emperor Shun, 2356 B.C.  It is found in the great Temple of Heaven at Peking.  Dr. Martin and Professors Legge and Douglas all insist that the sacrifices there celebrated are relics of the ancient worship of a supreme God.  China is full of the traces of polytheism; the land swarms with Taouist deities of all names and functions, with Confucian and ancestral tablets, and with Buddhist