with
its temptations would not appear; the world-old battle with the
flesh would be won. But separate yourself in yourself,--consider
yourself as a selfhood, not as a unit in society;--and you find,
there where you have put yourself, evil to contend with a-plenty.
Virtue inheres in the Brotherhood of Man; vice in the separate
personal and individual units. Virtue is in That which is no
man's possession, but common to all: namely, the Soul--though he
does not enlarge upon it as that; perhaps never mentions it as
the Soul at all;--vice is in that which each has for himself
alone: the personality. Hence his hatred of religiosity, of
personal soul-saving. You were to guard against evil in the
simplest way: by living wholly in humanity, finding all you
motives and sources of action there. If you were, in the highest
sense, simply a factor in human society, you were a good man. If
you lived in yourself alone,--having all evil to meet there, you
were likely to succumb to it; and you were on the wrong road
anyway. Come out, then; think not of your soul to be saved, nor
of what may befall you after death. You, as you, are of no
account; all that matters is humanity as a whole, of which you
are but a tiny part.--Now, if you like, say that Confucius did
not teach Theosophy, because, _so far as we know,_ he said
nothing about Karma or Reincarnation. I am inclined to think him
one of the two or three supreme historical Teachers of Theosophy;
and to say that his message, so infinitely simple, is one of the
most wonderful presentations of it ever given.

It is this entire purity from all taint of personal religion;
this distaste for prayer and unrelish for soul-salvation; this
sweet clean impersonality of God and man, that makes the
missionary writers find him so cold and lifeless. But when you
look at him, it is a marvelously warm-hearted magnetic man you
see: Such a One as wins hearts to endless devotion. Many of the
disciples were men who commanded very much the respect of
the world. The king of Ts'u proposed to give Confucius an
independent duchy: to make a sovereign prince of him, with
territories absolutely his own. But one of his ministers
dissuaded him thus: "Has your majesty," said he, "any diplomatist
in your service like Tse Kung? Or anyone so fitted to be prime
minister as Yen Huy? Or a general to compare with Tse Lu? . . .
If K'ung Ch'iu were to acquire territory, with such men as these
to serve h