The superstition which we here find dignified with the forms of Christian faith manifests itself among so many races and under such diverse stages of civilization that it may be regarded as an inevitable incident in human evolution, only to be outgrown at the latest periods of development. In this, however, as in so many other particulars, China furnishes virtually an exception. Her arrested thought exhibits itself, in the King or sacred books collected by Confucius five hundred years before the Christian era, in nearly the same form as is found in the orthodox opinion of to-day. In this, religious belief is but a system of cold morality, which avoids the virtues as well as the errors of more imaginative faiths. In the most revered and authoritative of the Chinese Scriptures, the Shu-King, or Holy Book, we find a theo-philosophy based on a Supreme Power, _Tai-Ki_, or Heaven, which is pure reason, or the embodiment of the laws and forces of nature acting under the pressure of blind destiny. It is true that some forms of divination were practised, and even enjoined, but no fuller expression of belief in direct interposition from above is to be found than that contained in the saying attributed to Muh-Wang (about 1000 B. C.) in his instructions to his judges in criminal cases: “Say not that Heaven is unjust; it is man who brings these evils on himself. If it were not that Heaven inflicts these severe punishments the world would be ungoverned.”[821] It is, therefore, in strict compliance with this philosophy that in the modern jurisprudence of China there is no allusion to any evidence save that of facts duly substantiated by witnesses, and even oaths are neither required nor admitted in judicial proceedings.[822]