sing thoughts of his own not based upon or in perfect harmony with
the teaching of the ancients. He was not an original thinker. He was a
compiler, an editor, a defender and reproclaimer of the ancient
religion, and an exemplar of the wisdom and writings of the Chinese
fathers. He felt that his duty was exactly that which some Christian
theologians of to-day conscientiously feel to be theirs--to receive
intact a certain "deposit" or "system" and, adding nothing to it, simply
to teach, illuminate, defend, enforce and strongly maintain it as "the
truth." He gloried in absolute freedom from all novelty, anticipating in
this respect a certain illustrious American who made it a matter for
boasting, that his school had never originated a new idea.[1] Whether or
not the Master Kung did nevertheless, either consciously or
unconsciously, modify the ancient system by abbreviating or enlarging
it, we cannot now inquire.

Confucius wan born into the world in the year 551 B.C., during that
wonderful century of religious revival which saw the birth of Ezra,
Gautama, and Lao Tsze, and in boyhood he displayed an unusually sedate
temperament which made him seem to be what we would now call an
"old-fashioned child." The period during which he lived was that of
feudal China. From the ago of twenty-two, while holding an office in the
state of Lu within the modern province of Shan-Tung, he gathered around
him young men as pupils with whom, like Socrates, he conversed in
question and answer. He made the teachings of the ancients the subjects
of his research, and he was at all times a diligent student of the
primeval records. These sacred books are called King, or Ki[=o] in
Japanese, and are: Shu King, a collection of historic documents; Shih
King, or Book of Odes; Hsiao King, or Classic of Filial Piety, and Yi
King, or Book of Changes.[2] This division of the old sacred canon,
resembles the Christian or non-Jewish arrangement of the Old Testament
scriptures in the four parts of Law, History, Poetry and Prophesy,
though in the Chinese we have History, Poetry, Ethics and Divination.[3]

His own table-talk, conversations, discussions and notes were compiled
by his pupils, and are preserved in the work entitled in English, "The
Confucian Analects," which is one of the four books constituting the
most sacred portion of Chinese philosophy and instruction. He also wrote
a work named "Spring and Autumn, or Chronicles of his Native State of Lu
from