'Chi Lu asked about serving the spirits of the dead, and the master said, "While you are not able to serve men, how can you serve their spirits?" The disciple added, "I venture to ask about death," and he was answered, "While you do not know life, how can you know about death [3]."' Still more striking is a conversation with another disciple, recorded in the 'Narratives of the School.' Tsze-kung asked him, saying, 'Do the dead have knowledge (of our services, that is), or are they without knowledge?' The master replied, 'If I were to say that the dead have such knowledge, I am afraid that filial sons and dutiful grandsons would injure their substance in paying the last offices to the departed; and if I were to say that the dead have not such knowledge, I am afraid lest unfilial sons should leave their parents unburied. You need not wish, Tsze, to know whether the dead have knowledge or not. There is no present urgency about the point. Hereafter you will know it for yourself [4].' Surely this was not the teaching proper to a sage. 1 Ana. XIV. xxxvii. 2 Ana. III. xii. 3 Ana. XI. xi. 4 家語, 卷二, art. 致思, towards the end. He said on one occasion that he had no concealments from his disciples [1]. Why did he not candidly tell his real thoughts on so interesting a subject? I incline to think that he doubted more than he believed. If the case were not so, it would be difficult to account for the answer which he returned to a question as to what constituted wisdom:-- 'To give one's self earnestly,' said he, 'to the duties due to men, and, while respecting spiritual beings, to keep aloof from them, may be called wisdom [2].' At any rate, as by his frequent references to Heaven, instead of following the phraseology of the older sages, he gave occasion to many of his professed followers to identify God with a principle of reason and the course of nature; so, in the point now in hand, he has led them to deny, like the Sadducees of old, the existence of any spirit at all, and to tell us that their sacrifices to the dead are but an outward form, the mode of expression which the principle of filial piety requires them to adopt when its objects have departed this life. It will not be supposed that I wish to advocate or to defend the practice of sacrificing to the dead. My object has been to point out how Confucius recognised it, without acknowledging the faith from which it must have originated, and how he enforced it as a matter of form or ceremony. It thus connects itself with the most serious charge that can be brought against him,-- the charge of insincerity. Among the four things which it is said he taught, 'truthfulness' is specified [3], and many sayings might be quoted from him, in which 'sincerity' is celebrated as highly and demanded as stringently as ever it has been by any Christian moralist; yet he was not altogether the truthful and true man to whom we accord our highest approbation.