Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/86

“The tyrant-oppressor might have his tablet in the temple, and his spirit might be feasted and prayed to as much as if he had been a great benefactor of the people. One of the finest poems in the ‘Book of Odes’ is a prayer by King Hsūan of the ninth century before Christ in a time of excessive drought. He prays to his parents for succour, though his father had been notoriously wicked and worthless.”

Such was the old faith as to a future state. When Confucius came to be its expounder, he showed reluctance to offer any definite opinions about a hereafter. He believed in the immortality of the soul, but he seems to have had a profound conviction that human intelligence could never acquire trustworthy insight into the realm of the supernatural, and that men busying themselves with such subjects were likely to become superstitious visionaries. His clearest utterance on this matter was: “All the living must die, and dying, return to the ground . . . The bones and flesh moulder away below, and, hidden away, become the earth of the fields. But the spirit issues forth and is displayed on high in a condition of glorious brightness.” That is absolutely explicit, so far as it goes. But it does not go far enough to satisfy any curiosity about the character of the eternal existence predicated for the soul: it is silent about the conditions of the future life and about the possibility of communion between the spirits of