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Only then did Confucianism begin to develop into the imposing system that dominated China almost down to the present day. Confucianism did not become a religion. It was comparable to the later Japanese Shintoism, or to a group of customs among us which we all observe, if we do not want to find ourselves excluded from our community, but which we should never describe as religion.

The tyranny of the father and of the older brother, and the sale of daughters to shame, will pass away; and there will arise in the Japanese house, the Christian home. It would be hard to say what Confucianism has done for woman. It is probable that all civilizations, and systems of philosophy, ethics and religion, can be well tested by this criterion the position of woman.

Ascetic observances, as a means of attaining perfection, were an inheritance from popular Brahmanism. Confucius steadily declined to teach anything about divine worship; Confucianism remained merely an ethical system, dealing only with the present life, until its founder, with disregard of his teaching, was divinized.

It may be said that in the sixth century which concerns us especially although Confucianism continued to be highly esteemed, Buddhism had become supreme in China that venerable State which is the mother of civilization in all Asia cast of the Ganges, and the Middle Kingdom among pupil nations. Confucianism overflowed from China into Korea, where to this day it is predominant even over Buddhism.

The people at large, cut off by this restricted worship from direct access to God, have wandered away into every sort of polytheism and idolatry, while the religion of the educated Chinese is a mediæval philosophy based upon Confucianism, of which we shall speak hereafter.

Confucianism, being a system of moral principles, is coeval with the people and deals with the middle stage of humanity. Buddhism, the fruit of principles, arose when the human intellect matured. It explains the last stage of man. To like or dislike Buddhism without any reason is simply an individual prejudice. Heaven commands us to obey reason. The individual cannot contend against heaven.

Mohammedanism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Brahmanism, and many other alien and heathen faiths count their adherents by the thousands, while many one-time Christian folk are turning to the modern forms of these religions. The fact that rescue homes for Chinese slave girls are a feature of Home Mission work among Orientals tells its own story of degrading customs transplanted to America's shores.

The germ is perhaps to be found in the engraving of seals, which have been used by the Chinese as far back as we can go with anything like historical certainty, and also of stone tablets from which rubbings were taken, the most important of these being the forty-six tablets on which five of the sacred books of Confucianism were engraved about A.D. 170, and of which portions still remain.

Confucianism did not assume its present form until the twelfth century A.D., when the personal God in whom Confucius had believed was thrust aside by the philosopher Chu Fu Tze, whose interpretation of Confucianism has ever since been recognized as orthodox.

Confucianism, the philosophic basis of the power of the gentry, served him as a bait; he made use of the so-called "old character school" for his purposes. When, after the holocaust of books, it was desired to collect the ancient classics again, texts were found under strange circumstances in the walls of Confucius's house; they were written in an archaic script.