255 



OEDINARY GENERAL MEETING* 

 PvEY. John Tuckwell, M.E.A.S., in the Chaik. 



The Minutes of the previous Meeting were read and confirmed. 



Election. — Dr. H. L. Underwood, Erzeroom, Turkey, was elected 

 Missionary Associate. 



The following paper was then read by the author :— 



MENCIUS. By Eev. E. Stoeks Turner, B.A. 



BOEN one hundred and seven years after the death of Con- 

 fucius, Mencius was the saviour of Confucian orthodoxy 

 in an age when it seemed to be nearly extinguished by opposi- 

 tion and neglect. After ages, therefore, coupled together the 

 names of the great master and his posthumous disciple as though 

 they had been joint founders of the national reUgion. Strictly 

 speaking, Confucius himself did not originate his doctrines; 

 his function also was to defend, expound., and hand on the 

 teachings of the wise and heroic kings of preceding ages, whose 

 deeds and speeches were sung in the Chinese book of psahns 

 and recorded in the histories. The origin of Chinese religion 

 belongs to prehistoric times. Mencius is, comparatively speak- 

 ing, a modern, ratlior than an ancient sage. He was the contem- 

 porary of Plato and Aristotle. He was born in 372 B.C. and 

 died at the age of eighty-four in 288 B.C. 



Rightly to appreciate the man and his work, we must have 

 some knowledge of the land and the people to which he belonged. 

 Moses, Zoroaster, Socrates lived in a world wlierein great nations 

 contended for supremacy, Egypt, Babylon, Persia, Greece. 

 China, on the contrary, cut off from the Western world more 

 effectively by the deserts and mountain ranges of Central Asia, 

 than by the Eastern Ocean, was a world by itself, which had not 



* Monday, May 27th, 1907. 



