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Have we not here "as in a glass darkly" a parable propounded three hundred years later in another clime and by a greater Teacher, who called Himself the Way of Righteousness, through whom the lost could be found? But I stray from my point. Righteousness, according to Mencius, is a straight and narrow path which a man ought to take to regain the lost paradise.
One of the feudal rulers was speaking to Mencius about a wicked emperor of eight hundred years back, who had been attacked by a patriot hero, and who had perished in the flames of his palace. "May then a subject," he asked, "put his sovereign to death?"
This, then, was the Bushido teaching Bear and face all calamities and adversities with patience and a pure conscience; for as Mencius taught, "When Heaven is about to confer a great office on anyone, it first exercises his mind with suffering and his sinews and bones with toil; it exposes his body to hunger and subjects him to extreme poverty; and it confounds his undertakings.
Mencius met this argument by showing that in the process of extracting cups and bowls from a block of wood, the wood as a block is destroyed, and he pointed out that, according to such reasoning, man's nature would also be destroyed in the process of getting righteousness out of it.
"And don't forget that Mencius, the first disciple of Confucius, was born and died in Shantung, too, when you are taking census of the spiritual values of Shantung to the Chinese," was a word of caution from the old missionary who was checking up on my facts for me. He had been laboring in China for a quarter of a century.
And I can never feel sure of Confucius' own Spring and Autumn Annals, wherein he thought lay his highest claim to human gratitude, and the composition of which the really brilliant-minded Mencius considered equal to the work of Ta Yu in bridling China's Sorrow; but which, as they come down to us, are not impressive.
Confucius, as I have tried to show you, had all Mysticism divinely behind and backing him, though he said little about it; Mencius, I think, had none. Mencius remade a Confucius of his own, with the mystical elements lacking. He saw in him only a social reformer and teacher of ethics; and it is the easiest thing in the world to see Confucius only through Mencian spectacles.
Mencius, of the third century B.C., observed that written characters had the same form, and axle-trees the same breadth, all over the empire; and to this day an unaltering uniformity is one of the chief characteristics of the Chinese people in every department of life.
Mencius, who lived B.C. 372-289, and devoted himself to the task of spreading and consolidating the Confucian teachings, made no attempt to lead back the Chinese people towards their early beliefs in a personal God and in a spiritual world beyond the ken of mortals.
Mencius had taught centuries before, in almost the identical phrase, what Carlyle has latterly expressed, namely, that "Shame is the soil of all Virtue, of good manners and good morals."
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