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the father has become a king. And the reason is plain. It is not the parent as such that is exalted; it is only one member of the parental relation. The father of the family is crowned to the exclusion and to the disparagement of the mother. The fact is significant; it shows that despotism, and not home-life, is the ruling motive. If Western civilisation has increasingly reached the ideal of a State modelled on family relations, it is because Western civilisation has started from a different ideal of the family itself. It is because it has learned to reverence not merely the paternal but the parental, not merely the headship over the household but the participation in a common life.

It is because it has started from the patriarchal ideal as the model of political excellence, that the Chinese empire has failed to realise the perfection for which it is seeking. The failure has been evidenced alike in its speculative and in its practical life. Its speculative life has been utterly dwarfed in its development. It seems to have started with a monotheistic idea of God, and Dr Legge maintains that this is the earliest conception in its whole religious history.1 But whither has it departed? The first has in this instance not been the last. The idea of God has retired into the background, and its place has been taken by the idea of the

1 Religions of China, p. 16.

kingdom of heaven.1 The Chinaman has surrendered himself to the thought of a divine order, but he has ceased to think of a divine Orderer. He has nowhere denied it but he has everywhere ignored it, and the ignoring is more remarkable when it comes as the sequel of a previous recognition. Is not the inference plain? The Chinaman's idea of God has been corrupted by his own system. He has started with the notion of monarchy in the household, and therefore the idea of fatherhood has become to him a synonym for distance. He has transferred to heaven his ideal of the home-life, until heaven itself has ceased to be associated with anything which is near. God is only felt by His rule, and He rules from afar; He is Himself unseen, unfelt, unknown, and unknowable. It is the same result which is found afterwards in the history of Judea. The constant contemplation of a patriarchal God identified fatherhood with monarchy, until the idea of divine care was lost in the thought of divine majesty. The God of Judea, like the God of China, retired into the remote distance and ceased to be a recognised agent in the development of things below. The only difference was that, while the Jew filled up the gulf by the interposition of a hierarchy of angels, the Chinaman left the gulf unfilled, and

It is only fair to state that the most modern development of Confucianism is to some extent regressive towards the primitive theistic standpoint.

denied to the spirit of man a vision of aught beyond. the earth.1

woman.

And in practical life also the influence of the Chinese ideal has been equally cramping. It has had a peculiar effect in lowering the standard of Not that the position of woman in China is more subordinate than in other parts of the East; in this respect the Chinese empire compares even favourably. But the point is, that from the hopes held out by Confucianism one would have expected a complete subversion of the Eastern subordination of woman. One would have expected that a creed whose leading principle was justice, whose leading article was reciprocity, whose leading aim was the establishment of a kingdom which should be based on the adjustment of the rights of man, would have found for womanhood a worthy and a ruling sphere. Proposing as it did to fashion the kingdom after the model of the family, we should have thought that in this kingdom the influence of the female would have had dominant sway. It has not been so, and why? Clearly because the Chinaman, in starting from the ideal of family life, has started from that ideal in its most primitive form. He has sought to find the per

'On the impersonal character of the later object of Chinese worship, see M'Clatchie's "Paper on Chinese Theology" in the Journal of the Asiatic Society,' xvi. 397.

fection of family relationships in the type called patriarchal, and the result has been that on the very threshold of his development the idea of the parent has been swamped in the idea of the monarch. Power, masculine power, arbitrary power, has become from the very outset the symbol and the goal of the life of home, and instead of the kingdom being built up after the model of a household, the household has been constructed after the model of a kingdom. In such a society, by the very nature of the case, woman can have no ruling sphere. Her position is by necessity one of entire subordination. The empire belongs not to the parent but to the father, and the submission of the child is based not on love but on law. Chinese society has been what the Chinese empire has been a state destitute of feminine features,1 hard, cold, rigid, motionless. It has exhibited no flexibility, no variety, no changes of expression, no capacity to be moved by the softer influences. It has been regulated, in theory indeed, upon principles of the strictest justice, but it has been the justice not of instituting equal rights, but of maintaining the rights of original possession.

Hence

It would seem as if modern China had recognised this social want; she appears latterly to have made an attempt towards the establishment of virgin worship. See 'Nouveau Journal Asiatique,' p. 295.

If now we pass to the second of the great Chinese systems-the creed of Lâo-tze-we shall find that the national religion has again failed to realise itself by seeking from a primitive age what is not to be found there. The doctrine of Lâo-tze is in the abstract a very lofty one, more lofty than that of Confucius. It proposes to usher the human soul into peace by the destruction of self-consciousness, and in this respect it bears a striking resemblance to the great moral tenet of Christianity. Indeed, Lâo-tze is credited with having uttered a maxim similar to that of Christ in the declaration that the least shall be greatest. Yet just as Confucianism, in its effort after a kingdom of heaven, has failed where Christianity has succeeded, so the doctrine of Lâo-tze, in its effort after the destruction of self-consciousness, has also failed where Christianity has succeeded. That it has failed is a matter of historical certainty; the Chinaman is of all men the least typical of self-sacrifice. The question is, Why? And the answer is, Because Lâo-tze, like Confucius, has sought in a wrong quarter for the realisation of his dream. He has gone back to the most primitive type. He has proposed to destroy self-consciousness by reducing man to the state of a plant, by stemming the impulses of life and imposing the conditions of an absolute stillness. Christianity, like Lâo-tze, has proclaimed the necessity to

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