Lao-tsz, and quote the words of (if they do not mention) his book. When we read Renan's masterly examination into the origins of our own Gospels, and when we reflect that even the origin of Shakespeare's plays, and the individuality of Shakespeare's person, are open to everlasting discussion, we may not unreasonably leave Chinese critics and Chinese historians to judge of the value of their own national evidence, and accept in general terms what they tell us of fact, however imperfect it may be in detail, without adding hypothetical facts or raising new critical difficulties of our own. No such foreign criticisms are or can be worth much unless the original Chinese histories and the original Chinese philosophers have been carefully examined by the foreign critic in the original Chinese text. CHAPTER XLVI ORACLES AND OMENS Consulting the oracles seems to have been a universal practice, and there are numerous historical allusions, made by statesmen of the orthodox principalities, to supposed interpretations attached to this or that combination of mystic signs or diagrams from the "Changes," together with arguments as to their specific meaning or omen in given circumstances. Doubtless the Chinese of those dates, like our own searchers for religious "analogies" and mysteries, examined with perfect good faith combinations of the Diagrams which to us appear arrant nonsense; and there can be no doubt of Confucius' own individual zeal, though the fact that he thought fifty years' study at least would be necessary for full comprehension points to the tacit confession that he had totally failed to understand much of the mystery. The Changes are supposed to have been developed by the father of the Warrior King when (about 1160 B.C.) he was in prison under the tyrannous suspicions of the last Shang emperor; and we have seen that the ruler of Ts'u _was_ his tutor, at a time when Ts'u was not yet vassal to Chou. Like the Odes, Book, and Rites, the Changes were Chou literature, though possibly the unwritten traditions of earlier dynasties may have contributed to that literature; which, indeed, seems very likely, as Ts'u was already able to teach Chou.