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If. THE LIFE AND TIMES OF CONFUCIUS. 57
one in the empire that wilt make me his master. My time
has come to die.' So it was. He went to his couch, and
after seven days expired."*
Thus passed away China's greatest moral philosopher.
Living a life of honour in his own age, he transmitted to
future generations a practical philosophy they could appreciate
and in a measure follow. Conservative in mind,
character and conduct he saw no visions and dreamt no
dreams. The life that now is was his principal text, immortality
he left undiscussed. The great questions of God
and the soul, that have stirred the noblest thinkers, Greek,
Jew and Christian evoked no enthusiasm in him; the
higher morals which found vague expression in Laotz_i,
and majestic pourtrayal in Jesus Christ were foreign to his
rigid mind, which lacking the entrancing ravishment of
the Infinite demanded rules fixed and inelastic.
In avoiding the marvellous, with which Nature and
Eternity abounds, he escaped the perils of gross superstition,
and left behind him a mould for this nation to run
itself into, which involved as a necessary consequence an
arrested development. Man lequires the bounds of the
Infinite and Eternal for his complete evolution, and had
Confucius bent his mind to this soul filling principle he
might have prevented millions of his countrymen of succeeding
generations, whom his narrow mould refused to
contain, from overflowing into the excessive and debasing
superstitions of later Taoism and Buddhism.
To the light he found he was faithful, for the light he
Legge's Antro. p, 87-8.