Of a personal deity above all these our author makes no mention, nor can it be inferred with certainty from his book whether he believed in the existence of such a being. In one place he speaks of Nature (Tao) as being antecedent to the manifestation of Ti (帝), a word which the commentators usually explain as meaning lord or master of heaven.[11] The learned Dr. Medhurst translates the passage in question thus, “I do not know whose son it (viz., Taóu) is; it is prior to the (Supreme) Ruler of the visible (heavens).” I do not understand how, after this, the same author can state that the Taoists, that is, with Lao-tzŭ at their head, understand the word Ti “in the sense of the Supreme Being.”[12] Ghosts and Spirits (鬼 and 神) are referred to in the Tao-tê Ching, but these are very subordinate beings capable of being controlled by the saints of the earth. Lao-tzŭ refers, however, as has been seen, to a supernatural punisher of crime; and in several passages he speaks of heaven in a manner very similar to that in which we do when we mean thereby the Deity who presides over heaven and earth.[13] Yet we must not forget that it is inferior and subsequent to the mysterious Tao, and in fact produced by the latter. I cannot, accordingly, agree with the learned Pauthier when he writes thus about the Sixteenth Chapter of the Tao-tê Ching—“Ce chapitre renferme à lui seul les éléments d’une religion; et il n’est pas étonnant que les Sectateurs de Lao-tseu, si habiles, comme tous les Asiatiques, à tirer d’un principe posé toutes les conséquences qui en découlent logiquement, aient établi un culte et un sacerdoce avec les doctrines du philosophe; car dès l’instant qu’un Dieu suprême est annoncé, que les bonnes actions et la connaissance que l’on acquiert de lui sont les seuls moyens pour l’homme de parvenir a l’ternelle félicité dans son sein, il est bien évident qu’il faut des médiateurs entre ce Dieu et l’homme pour conduire et éclairer les intelligences ignorantes et faibles.”[14] Tao with Lao-tzŭ is not a deity, but is above all deities, and, as has been seen, it is not always represented unchangeable. On the contrary, regarded from one point of view the Tao is in a state of constant change—“twinkling restlessly,” to use an expression from Wordsworth. Only when considered as the existence which was solitary in the universe and eternal, is it spoken of as unchanging. Long after Lao-tzŭ’s time Tao was, indeed, raised or rather degraded to be a deity, but the theories of later Taoists are seldom the logical developments of the doctrines of Lao-tzŭ, and in this they err widely.