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The Chinese students who aspire to honors spend years in verbally memorizing the classics Confucius and Mencius and receive degrees and public advancement upon ability to transcribe from memory without the error of a point, or misplacement of a single tea-chest character, the whole of some books of morals. You do not wonder that China is today more like an herbarium than anything else.
They are both called more daring thinkers than their predecessors; which is merely to say that in them the Spirit figured more on the intellectual, less on its own plane. They were lesser men, of course. Mencius had lost Confucius' spirituality; Chwangtse, I think, something of the sweet sanifying influence of Laotse's universal compassion.
"By exerting his mental powers to the full, man comes to understand his own nature. When he understands his own nature, he understands God." In all the above instances the term used for God is T'ien. Only in one single passage does Mencius use Shang Ti: "Though a man be wicked, if he duly prepares himself by fasting and abstinence and purification by water, he may sacrifice to God." Ch'u Yuan.
These pronouncements, cast in the form of periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government; their purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were designed to teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor was the High Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the morality of the Golden Age, which had been inculcated by all the philosophers since Confucius and Mencius flourished twenty-five centuries ago, would not only secure universal happiness but contribute to national greatness.
The writings of Confucius and Mencius formed the principal text-books for youths and the highest authority in discussion among the old. A mere acquaintance with the classics of these two sages was held, however, in no high esteem. A common proverb ridicules one who has only an intellectual knowledge of Confucius, as a man ever studious but ignorant of Analects.
This successful soldier, whose name signifies the Warrior King, founded the third Chinese dynasty of Chow, which governed the empire for the long space of 867 years down to 266 B.C. During that protracted period there were necessarily good and bad emperors, and the Chow dynasty was rendered specially illustrious by the appearance of the great social and religious reformers, Laoutse, Confucius and Mencius, during the existence of its power.
Analects, VII, xvii. 2 Analects, VIII, viii, XVII, ix. Analects, XVII, x. From Confucius to rise of the Khin dynasty. Of the attention paid to the study of the Shih from the death of Confucius to the rise -of the Khin dynasty, we have abundant evidence in the writings of his the grandson Dze-sze, of Mencius, and of Hsuen Khing.
If an advocate of constitutional monarchy is capable of doing such unlawful acts, we may easily imagine what sort of a constitutional monarchy he advocates; and we may also easily imagine what the fate of his constitutional monarchy will be. Mencius says, "Am I argumentative? I cannot help it."
That is to say, Chou by his rascality had already forfeited all the rights and privileges of kingship before he was actually put to death. On another occasion Mencius was questioned about the duties of ministers and royal relatives. "If the sovereign rules badly," he said, "they should reprove him; if he persists again and again in disregarding their advice, they should dethrone him."
This could not be the case if any of the three appealed strongly to patriotic sentiment, or gave full expression to the ideals of the nation. Legge. The same writer has published three convenient volumes of his own, containing: 1. The Life and Teachings of Confucius, 2. The Life and Works of Mencius, 3. The Shi-King. Dr. Legge has also written a popular work, The Religions of China, 1880.
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