The first step towards this is to study what they were; the next, to try and trace out the various causes which have combined to make them what they are, and I think it will be found that amongst the chief of these causes may be ranked the teaching of Confucius. "De la seule Raison salutaire interprète Sans éblouir le monde éclairant les esprits, So wrote of him a great Frenchman of the last century, at a time when the curiosity of the literary world had been strangely excited by the vast amount of information published by the Jesuits, then in the plenitude of their power at the Court of Peking, concerning the wonderful, and till then little known, country, in which they had laboured for so many years with such extraordinary ability and devotion. Amongst the many volumes of which the "Mémoires concernant les Chinois" is composed, is one by le Père Amiot, in which all the incidents in the life of Confucius, derived from Chinese sources, are minutely related. This has been largely followed by subsequent writers, and to that work and one on China by M. Pauthier, I am greatly indebted in the following pages. (7) CHAPTER II. Contemporary events of the time in which Confucius lived-Origin and chronology of the ancient Chinese, and their moral, political, and social progress down to the same period. In order that we may have a clear comprehension of our subject, it is necessary for us to picture to ourselves the state of those portions of the habitable world, made known to us by sacred and profane records, at the time in which Confucius lived. It was a momentous period, pregnant with great events. It included the downfall of Lydia, Media, and Babylonia, and the establishment of Persia upon their ruins; the release of the Jews from their seventy years' captivity, and the rebuilding of that temple which was not to be again destroyed till after the coming of the promised Messiah; the rise of Buddhism in India; the restoration of democracy in Athens; the expulsion of the Tarquins from Rome; the invasion of Greece by the Persians, and the battles of Marathon, Thermopyla, and Salamis. It was an age of great men. Sakya Buddha, the Daniel, Haggai and religious reformer; Ezekiel and Zachariah, amongst the prophets; Cyrus the Great, Cambyses, Darius, and Xerxes of the powers of the earth; Pythagoras, the Samian philosopher; the writers, Pindar, Eschylus, and Anacreon; Leonidas the Spartan, Miltiades and Themistocles the Athenians, and a host of others too numerous for mention. It cannot be said that the several portions of the world which have been enumerated were either barbarous or uncivilized; for the arts and sciences were highly cultivated, and their political and social state was extremely artificial, and far removed from those primitive conditions which form the basis upon which all rude societies are regulated; yet, despite all this, and the brilliant intellectual powers with which so many individual minds had been gifted, they were, with but one solitary exception, enshrouded in the darkness of complex systems of idolatry, differing in detail, but agreeing in the gross and degrading nature of the superstitions emanating from them, and which it would appear was common to them all. Let us now turn our attention to a remote corner of the same world, at the same time, in the far, far East. We shall find there a people who have also CONTEMPORARY EVENTS. 9 long since emerged from barbarism, surrounded by nomadic hordes and natural barriers, and so cut off from intercourse with the other advanced races of mankind, perfecting by different processes and by slow degrees that marvellous system of moral government which first created and then preserved during so many ages the Chinese empire. Nineveh and Babylon-those vast cities-are no more upon their sites we see but shapeless mounds. The empire of Cyrus has passed away. Greece, as a material power, is but a shadowy fragment. Imperial Rome, the mistress of the world, exists only as a tradition, an influence, and an example; for that life which is now found amidst her ruins, is but an embodiment of the living Present connected only by name with the buried Past. We still reverence Daniel and the prophets, but Israel is an outcast and a wanderer. The thoughts of the great writers of antiquity still live in the classic page; but all else is changed, and, look where we will, it is in China, and in China only, that we find traces of the distant Past, not dimly shadowed forth through a lengthened vista of changeful years, but standing out in bold relief from the destruction which the hand of time has so ruthlessly worked on all else around. The origin of the Chinese is extremely obscure. We only know that at some period so distant that no approximate date can be given for it, they must have separated themselves from the main portion of the great human family by which Asia was then occupied, and, moving eastward, descended into the fertile plains, north of the Yellow River, where, abandoning their nomadic habits, they finally settled, and laid the foundations of a vast empire. Although the date of the separation we have referred to cannot be accurately fixed, it is evident that it must have taken place long before language had received those developments which created Hebrew, Sanscrit, and their cognate tongues; for the language of the Chinese, however else changed it may be, has preserved to this day that exceptional monosyllabic arrangement peculiar to the primogenial state of man, and the cause of this seems unquestionably to be found in the fact of their early adoption of a system of ideographic characters, thoroughly adapted to such a form of speech, and not easily made applicable to any other. It is true that an attempt has been made to prove that the Chinese were originally an Egyptian colony, and much stress has been laid on the circumstance of the similarity—amounting in some few instances * "Uns erscheint die Chinesische Menschheit unter den Völkern wie das Urgebirge unter den übrigen Gebirgsformationen." Victor v. Strauss, Lao-tse's Tao-te-King, p. xli. |