Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/89

the departed and their living worshippers. Asked by one of his disciples whether the dead had knowledge of the service rendered to them by their survivors, Confucius answered: "If I were to say the dead have such knowledge, I am afraid that filial sons and dutiful grandsons would injure their substance in payment of the last offices to the departed; and if I were to say that the dead have not such knowledge, I am afraid that unfilial sons would leave their parents unburied. You need not wish to learn whether the dead have such knowledge or not. There is no present urgency about the point. Hereafter you will know it for yourself."

Chinese philosophers of the Confucian school do not believe, however, that wicked deeds meet with chastisement in the persons of their perpetrators only. When they say "happiness abounds in the family that accumulates virtue, misery in the family that accumulates vice," they understand that if good be not rewarded or evil punished in the experience of the individual, then it certainly will be in the experience of his posterity. But beyond the grave there are rest and comfort for all alike. That is obviously the weak spot in the system: it is the vacuum into which the superstitions of Buddhism and Confucianism subsequently flowed.

It should be emphatically noted that China does not owe her national religion to Confucius. He was only the unrivalled expounder and ex-