Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/90

pander of a creed handed down from prehistoric times.

Confucius was born in 552 B.C. and died in 478. The place of his nativity was the State of Lu—a part of Shantung — and he served there in more than one high official capacity with conspicuous success. Of the last eighteen years of his life fifteen were spent in wandering from principality to principality, no ruler having sufficient insight or sufficient moral courage to make use of his abilities, which nevertheless had attached to him multitudes of disciples, won for him wide renown, and laid the foundation of such homage from posterity as has never been earned by any other teacher of morals except Christ and Sakyamuni. Much has been written about him. Various interpretations have been given of his teachings. Many appreciations and some criticisms of his philosophy have been penned. But the West has seen him chiefly through Western spectacles, and the image has consequently been defective. His true interpreter can be only one of his countrymen; a man with philosophic acumen to comprehend him and literary competence to render his doctrines into a foreign tongue. Such an interpreter seems to have been found in Mr. Ku Hungming, whose résumé of the "Analects" enables an Occidental student to hear the great philosopher's voice clearly and to distinguish his utterances across the gulf of twenty-four centuries. The "Analects" con-