How then is this strange story of the broken oath to be explained? Probably by the simple statement that the story is not true. The incident is one which finds no place in the accepted Confucian canon: as Prof. H. A. Giles says, it "occurs in an admittedly spurious work,"[272]--namely the _Chia Yü_, which in its present form is believed to have been composed in the third century A.D. The only other authority for it is the great historian Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien. Confucius was born in 551 B.C., Ssŭ-ma Ch'ien no less than four hundred years later. It may, doubtless, be urged by those who believe in the story and wish at the same time to save the honour of Confucius, that the standard of truth at that time was very low and that Confucius was only acting in accordance with the practice of the age in breaking his plighted word. But we have no reason whatever to suppose that the standard was any lower than it is to-day in Christendom: and what no writer, so far as I am aware, seems to have made a note of is the important fact that the story, if true at all, is of itself a clear proof that the standard of honour was remarkably high. The rebel would not have given Confucius the option of taking an oath unless there had been an expectation on his part that Confucius would keep that oath; and if the expectation existed, it must even in those far-off days have been founded on a belief that a gentleman's word was "as good as his bond." Thus if we believe in the story we are compelled to adopt the conclusion that Confucius was not, as one would have thought, superior to his contemporaries in matters of morals, but was immeasurably their inferior: a conclusion which is patently absurd. To suppose after hearing the evidence of the canonical books that Confucius was a man who could deliberately break his word seems almost as unreasonable as to suppose that Sir Walter Scott ("true gentleman, heart, blood and bone," as Tennyson called him) could have acted dishonourably or that Sir Philip Sidney, the prince of chivalry, could have told a lie. I cannot hope that these remarks will re-establish Confucius's reputation as a lover of truth in the minds of those who wish for proselytising purposes to convince the Chinese that their sage was a grievous sinner. Such persons will doubtless in any case continue to hold that the Chinese as a people are untruthful, and that whether or not the untruthfulness is a legacy left them by Confucius it is a vice which only Christianity can extirpate. This question of Chinese untruthfulness we have already considered,[273] and a few words are all that is necessary here. [Illustration: WEIHAIWEI VILLAGERS (see p. 315).] [Illustration: SHEN-TZŬ (MULE-LITTER) FORDING A STREAM (see p. 17).]