candidate not so much graces of style as a wide acquaintance with practical subjects.  “Accordingly,” says one Chinese author, “even the pupils at the village schools threw away their text-books of rhetoric, and began to study primers of history, geography, and political economy”—­a striking anticipation of the movement in vogue to-day.  “I have myself been,” he tells us, “an omnivorous reader of books of all kinds, even, for example, of ancient medical and botanical works.  I have, moreover, dipped into treatises on agriculture and on needlework, all of which I have found very profitable in aiding me to seize the great scheme of the Canon itself.”  But like many other great men, he was in advance of his age.  He fell into disfavour at court, and was dismissed to a provincial post; and although he was soon recalled, he retired into private life, shortly afterwards to die, but not before he had seen the whole of his policy reversed.

His career stands out in marked contrast with that of the great statesman and philosopher, Chu Hsi (pronounced Choo Shee), who flourished A.D. 1130-1200.  His literary output was enormous and his official career successful; but his chief title to fame rests upon his merits as a commentator on the Confucian Canon.  As has been already stated, he introduced interpretations either wholly or partly at variance with those which had been put forth by the scholars of the Han dynasty, and hitherto received as infallible, thus modifying to a certain extent the prevailing standard of political and social morality.  His guiding principle was merely one of consistency.  He refused to interpret words in a given passage in one sense, and the same words occurring elsewhere in another sense.  The effect of this apparently obvious method was magical; and from that date the teachings of Confucius have been universally understood in the way in which Chu Hsi said they ought to be understood.

To his influence also must be traced the spirit of materialism which is so widely spread among educated Chinese.  The God in whom Confucius believed, but whom, as will be seen later on, he can scarcely be said to have “taught,” was a passive rather than an active God, and may be compared with the God of the Psalms.  He was a personal God, as we know from the ancient character by which He was designated in the written language of early ages, that character being a rude picture of a man.  This view was entirely set aside by Chu Hsi, who declared in the plainest terms that the Chinese word for God meant nothing more than “abstract right;” in other words, God was a principle.  It is impossible to admit such a proposition, which was based on sentiment and not on sound reasoning.  Chu Hsi was emphatically not a man of religious temperament, and belief in the supernatural was distasteful to him; he was for a short time under the spell of Buddhism, but threw that religion over for the orthodoxy of Confucianism.  He was, therefore, anxious to exclude the supernatural altogether from the revised scheme of moral conduct which he was deducing from the Confucian Canon, and his interpretation of the word “God” has been blindly accepted ever since.