The minds of Confucius and Mencius were warmed by moral considerations. Political and social questions were to them deeply interesting. They accepted the divination of the "Book of Changes" because Wen Wang and Cheu Kung were the saviours of the state and the advocates of benevolence and integrity. If divination by straws had been introduced, subsequently to the epoch of those sages, by men not taking the rank of sages, the moral instinct both of Confucius and Mencius would have absolutely refused all countenance to it.

Like credit cannot be claimed for the Sung philosophers. Wei Pe-yang, the Tauist of the Han dynasty, and others from whom they drew ideas, were not the representatives of a system which made morality its centre, but of alchemy and a doctrine of self-cultivation which inculcated physical aids instead of the simple teaching of genuine morality.

The extension of a physical philosophy weakens moral and religious sentiment. The alchemy and astrology of the Han made the Chinese nation less disposed to religious reverence. The occupation of the mind with materialistic ideas and aims obscures the spiritual vision and appetite. It was in this way, to no small extent, that the Chinese nation was prepared to receive Buddhism, partly from religious indifference, and in part also from a desire for

fervency in ritual and the acquisition of new spiritual objects on which to fix the soul's gaze. A thousand years more and Buddhism had had its trial, and been found wanting. What, then, should have been the course to be steadfastly pursued by the Confucianists of the Sung period? Undoubtedly, if they desired to follow the example of the sage, they should have opposed tooth and nail the Tauists and Buddhists. Both these religions are defective in the moral element, and that is the very soul of the Confucian system. They would have then done for the superstitious and heresies of their time what Confucius and Mencius did fifteen centuries before. When Luther, in Europe, made a stand for pure doctrine and against asceticism, he did what might to some small extent have been done by the Sung philosophers. Instead of this, they bowed their heads to superstition, allowed idolatry to increase in the land of Confucius, and raised no voice against it.

The most melancholy example of decay in moral and religious instinct is in the denial of a sovereign moral ruler in the universe, and the identification of God with reason and with primeval vapour. This is practically done by Chu fu-tsi, and he is on this account sharply condemned by writers of the present dynasty. The ancient Chinese understood by T'ien either the personal Ruler of the world, or the physical firmament. Chu fu-tsi said T'ien is nothing but li, "reason;" and elsewhere he identifies li with k'i, "vapour." Such was the unhappy result of the spread of the Tauist physical system and the Buddhist atheism in China.