62 



REV. ARTHUR ELWIN, ON CONFUCIANISM. 



Confucius had any food he offered a little of it up in sacrifice. 

 Was this in sacrifice to the ancestors, or to the spirits, or to God ? 

 Another question is ,on page 50, where it appears that if a little 

 baby had even one tooth it was supposed to have a soul. I should 

 be very glad to have some explanation of the supposed connection 

 of tooth and soul, if the lecturer will kindly favour us with the 

 supposed connection. And the third question I wish to ask is how 

 he accounts for it that Confucianism has attained such a wonderful 

 influence in China. 



Lieut.-Colonel Alves. — I should like to say just a word. A good 

 many people are talking now-a-days of the numberless good religions 

 in the world, as they call them, of which Christianity may be a 

 little better than some others, but that they are all very much 

 alike. I think there is a marvellous amount of sound Old Testa- 

 ment moral precepts of the Mosaic law in Confucianism. Mr. 

 Elwin's friend must have sorely repented himself of that boy who 

 was going to be drowned. According to the Mosaic ordinances, if 

 a woman have a rebellious son, who will not obey the voice of his 

 father, or that of his mother, they were to bring him before the 

 elders for sentence of death. I think it would be a very good 

 thing if that law were in existence at the present time. 



There are many other points which seem to be very sound. 



We remember how five and forty years ago, when Speke and 

 Grant went to discover the source of the Nile, they struck across 

 equatorial Africa, on to the lakes, and went down the Nile ; and if 

 we also go to the head and work down we find in the Bible in very 

 early days what may be called Mosaic-Levitical ordinances long 

 before the time of Abraham. We find clean beasts in the ark, and 

 not long after Abraham's time we see that people, when they went 

 to meet with God, had to be clean and wash their clothes. If 

 Levitical ordinances, which after all were only very secondary, > 

 should have been thus revealed, it was surely more important that 

 the moral ordinances of the law should have been given as the- 

 common property of the whole world. It is not unreasonable 

 to suppose that China should have possessed many of these ; and 

 that Confucius, who admits not to have been original, but only a 

 compiler of what was good, should have got hold of some of these 

 ordinances. But even Israel was in a state of legality, keeping 

 the law being a condition of life. It was a question of moral 



