REV. AKTHDR ELW1N, ON CONFUCIANISM. 63' 



ordinances, and that a man might not turn away from his righteous- 

 ness that he had done and die in his sin. That is not the hope of 

 the Christian and the teaching of the Apostle Paul. We remember- 

 that his remark concerning the heathen is that God deals with 

 those who were desirous of doing right differently from those who 

 have means of knowing the truth. Pre-Mosaic Revelation will 

 account for all the wonderful truth that Confucius put into his 

 system. We see in the Old Testament the marvellous authority 

 that a parent had over his children, something that we do not 

 dream of now-a-days. When Jephthah had made his rash vow,, 

 note his daughter's words. They were the words of a woman who 

 was loyal to the truth and who made light of her own sacrifice, 

 because her father had made his vow to Heaven. The Rechabites 

 also in the days of Jeremiah were bound by an old vow of 

 Jehonaclab, son of Rechab, that they were not to drink wine or to 

 live in houses. They obeyed the command of their father, although 

 the prophet of the Lord put wine before them to drink ; and they 

 were commended for it. Filial respect and obedience are strongly 

 enjoined in the Old Testament ; and there must have been 

 a good deal of moral doctrine floating about, some of which no 

 doubt had got into China, which was a country not so sealed up in 

 those days as it is now, 2,500 years later. It has had 2,500 years 

 of training to make it more conservative than in those earlier days. 



We are indebted to the reader of this paper, for he has given us a 

 great insight into the general teaching of Confucius. 



Mr. Rouse. — Is not the ascription to Almighty God, which if? 

 quoted by Mr. Elwin, the only one to be found in all the works of 

 Confucius, except that in his Book of History, he alludes to Him at 

 times as Shang-Ti, the Supreme Ruler. Believing this to be the 

 fact, I should judge that Confucius knew little of God as a Father,, 

 or of a way in which guilty sinners could be reconciled to Him 

 here below and find in Him thereafter a comforter and guide- 

 Confucius instilled principles of justice, patience, and temperance,, 

 and a spirit of wise reflection into his disciples, and both privately 

 and publicly during his brief sway as a ruler he illustrated that 

 spirit, and those principles in his own person ; but his philanthropy 

 stopped short at the negative maxim, " Do not do to others what 

 you would not have them do to you " : he rose not to the sublime 

 principles of the Sermon on the Mount, which was also, as the- 



