was exactly that which some Christian theologians of to-day conscientiously feel to be theirs—­to receive intact a certain “deposit” or “system” and, adding nothing to it, simply to teach, illuminate, defend, enforce and strongly maintain it as “the truth.”  He gloried in absolute freedom from all novelty, anticipating in this respect a certain illustrious American who made it a matter for boasting, that his school had never originated a new idea.[1] Whether or not the Master Kung did nevertheless, either consciously or unconsciously, modify the ancient system by abbreviating or enlarging it, we cannot now inquire.

Confucius wan born into the world in the year 551 B.C., during that wonderful century of religious revival which saw the birth of Ezra, Gautama, and Lao Tsze, and in boyhood he displayed an unusually sedate temperament which made him seem to be what we would now call an “old-fashioned child.”  The period during which he lived was that of feudal China.  From the ago of twenty-two, while holding an office in the state of Lu within the modern province of Shan-Tung, he gathered around him young men as pupils with whom, like Socrates, he conversed in question and answer.  He made the teachings of the ancients the subjects of his research, and he was at all times a diligent student of the primeval records.  These sacred books are called King, or Ki[=o] in Japanese, and are:  Shu King, a collection of historic documents; Shih King, or Book of Odes; Hsiao King, or Classic of Filial Piety, and Yi King, or Book of Changes.[2] This division of the old sacred canon, resembles the Christian or non-Jewish arrangement of the Old Testament scriptures in the four parts of Law, History, Poetry and Prophesy, though in the Chinese we have History, Poetry, Ethics and Divination.[3]

His own table-talk, conversations, discussions and notes were compiled by his pupils, and are preserved in the work entitled in English, “The Confucian Analects,” which is one of the four books constituting the most sacred portion of Chinese philosophy and instruction.  He also wrote a work named “Spring and Autumn, or Chronicles of his Native State of Lu from 722 B.C., to 481[4] B.C.”  He “changed his world,” as the Buddhists say, in the year 478 B.C., having lived seventy-three years.

Primitive Chinese Faith.

The pre-Confucian or primitive faith was monotheistic, the forefathers of the Chinese nation having been believers in one Supreme Spiritual Being.  There is an almost universal agreement among scholars in translating the term “Shang Ti” as God, and in reading from these classics that the forefathers “in the ceremonies at the altars of Heaven and earth ... served God.”  Concurrently with the worship of one Supreme God there was also a belief in subordinate spirits and in the idea of revelation or the communication of God with men.  This restricted worship of God was accompanied by reverence for ancestors and the honoring of spirits by prayers and sacrifices,