rior to the past in the items of benevolence and justice; but that in violations of conscience the past cannot compete with the present.
This tendency to depreciate the present time is by no means confined to China or to the Chinese, but is found with impartiality all over the earth; yet in the Celestial Empire it seems to have attained a sincerity of conviction not elsewhere equalled. All that is best in the ancient days is believed to have survived in the literature to which the present day is the heir, and it is for this reason that this literature is regarded with such unmixed idolatry. The orthodox Chinese view of the Chinese Classics appears to be much the same as the orthodox Christian view in regard to the Hebrew Scriptures; they are supposed to contain all that is highest and best of the wisdom of the past, and to contain all that is equally adapted to the present time and to the days of old. That anything is needed to supplement the Chinese Classics is no more believed by a good Confucianist, than it is believed by a good Christian that supplementary additions to the Bible are desirable or to be expected. Both Christians and Confucianists agree in the general proposition that when a thing is as good as it can be, it is idle to try to make it any better.
Just as many good Christians make some Bible "text" a pretext for something which the biblical writers never had in mind, so Confucian scholars are upon occasion able to find in "the old masters" not only authority for all the modern proceedings of the government, but the real roots of ancient mathematics, and even of modern science.
The literature of antiquity is that which has moulded the Chinese nation, and has brought about a system of government which, whatever its other qualities, has been proved to possess that of persistence. Since self-preservation is the first law of nations as of individuals, it is not singular that a form of rule which an experience of unmatched duration has shown to be
