things that are seen are temporal, there at least floats some vision of the things unseen and eternal; and if the vision be as yet shadowy and uncertain, that it can be as even unconsciously apprehended as an ideal is the silent prophecy of a future when it shall be grasped as a reality. Have we not here, therefore, a principle which enables us to discern in Buddhism something more than the impossible worship of a blank negation? In the fact that its negation was one which felt and knew itself to be a negation, in those strange dogmas which make its teaching seem but one long scornful wail over the vanity and misery of the world and human life, may we not read the longing for, and latent belief in, a higher truth, in the light of which it saw and rose above the negation? Was it not the eternal and divine, though it could only as yet be defined as the negative or contradiction of the transient and human, which gave their religion its secret hold over men's hearts? Whilst they seemed to themselves only to seek after escape from a world that was unreal and a life that was nothing but vanity, what they really though unconsciously sought after was participation in that infinite life which is and abideth for ever.

Moreover, as I have said, though religion cannot be a merely negative thing, all religious thought and feeling contain in them a negative element. It is not the language of paradox which the Christian believer employs when he speaks of "dying in order to live;" of "losing his life in order to find it;" of "bearing about in the body the death of Christ, that the life also of Christ may be manifest in us;" of "becoming dead to the world, that we may live unto God." That self-surrender to God in which the essence of religion lies, involves, as a necessary element of it, the abnegation of self, the renunciation of any life that belongs to me merely as this particular indi

viduality-of any life apart from God. As it is the primary condition of the intellectual life that the thinker effaces himself, gives up all merely individual opinions, prejudices, preconceptions-all ideas that pertain to him. merely as this particular self-and lets his mind become the pure medium of the universal life of truth and reason, -so it is the essential characteristic of the spiritual life that the individual lives no longer to himself. The initial act by which he enters on that life implies the renouncing of every wish and desire, every movement of inclination and will, that belong to his own private, exclusive self, or that point merely to his own interests and pleasures; and its whole subsequent course may be described as the more and more complete extinction of the narrow, isolated life that centres in self, the nearer and nearer ap proach to that state in which every movement of our mind and every pulsation of our spiritual being shall be in absolute harmony with the infinite mind and will, and apart from the life of God we shall have no life we can call our own.

The error, therefore, of Buddhism is, not that in it religion contained a negative element, but that it stopped short there. In the Christian conception of self-renunciation, to live no longer to ourselves is, at the same time, to enter into an infinite life that is dearer to us than our own; it is a death to self which rises to live again in the universal life of love to God and charity to all mankind. Yet even in that strange, morbid suppression of all human desire and passion, that impossible extinction of every natural impulse, which Buddhism inculcated, we may discern the unconscious groping of the spirit of man after something higher. To be in love with annihilation, to kindle human hearts by the fascination of nothingness, is indeed an impossible aim. And if we are confronted

by the moral paradox of a religion of negation which drew to itself the faith and devotion of countless multitudes, we may be sure that the attraction was not in the negation it seemed to preach, but in the positive truth in which that negation finds its complement and its explanation. Its last word was of the triumph of death over all human hope and love; but there was here at least some dim anticipation of another and yet unspoken word which it was given only to a far-off age to hear " When this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."

THE

RELIGION OF CHINA:

CONFUCIANISM.

'HE subject which has been allotted to us in this course of lectures is that phase of Chinese worship which constitutes the state religion, in the special form which it assumed five centuries before the Christian era. It is well that our field has been thus narrowed, for the subject of Chinese worship is in itself a vast one, and its attractiveness to the speculative mind is by no means proportionate to its vastness. As we pass from the lofty aspirations of the Brahmin, and from the mystic earnestness of the Buddhist, into the religious atmosphere of China, we feel instinctively that we are descending from the mountain into the plain. We are made aware that the bounds of our horizon are being curtailed, that we are exchanging the table-land for the valley, and that the era of poetry is giving place to the age of prose. Indeed, paradoxical as it may seem, the most interesting feature of Chinese worship is to us its want of interest, for it is this fact which, above all others, opens up the problem to be solved. We want to know why it is that a creed so cold, so passionless, so dead, is at this hour the dominating influence over 400,000,000 souls. We want to know why

it is that a faith which, in intellectual vigour, in pietistic fervour, in poetic beauty, sinks so immeasurably beneath the creed of the Brahmin and of the Buddhist, should yet have maintained its empire where the Brahmin and the Buddhist have been compelled to yield their ground. Above all, we want to know why it is that this prosaic belief, dignified with the name of a religion, has manifested in the history of China a persistency, a fixedness, a superiority to change or vicissitude, which is perhaps unparalleled in the religious life of man.

For it must be remembered that, in approaching the religion of China, we are approaching the incarnation of the spirit of conservatism. The faiths of the East are stagnant in comparison with those of the West; but in comparison with the religion of China, the faiths of the East are progressive. Brahminism is the worship of a universe whose life, though repeating itself in circles, is yet within each circle in a state of perpetual movement -creating, preserving, and destroying to create anew. Buddhism is the worship of death, and therefore the adoration of that which changes all human things. Parsism is the recognition of a world whose very essence is restless movement and struggle—a battle between light and darkness, in which the balance is ever wavering. Even Judaism, though pervaded by a strong conservative instinct, is seen ever pressing onward to a future goal. It places its Messianic glory, not in anything which it has. won, but in the advent of some golden hour which is yet to be. But in China we are confronted by a spectacle in every respect the reverse of these. We see a religion whose root is in the past, and whose essence is the fact that it has resisted the influence of progress. Nor is this an accident or a peculiarity of the Chinese mind; its religious conception is but the shadow of its national life.