But if, knowing it to have been enough,--knowing that the hour of the Open Door had passed, and that he should never see success again,--he had then and there retired into private life, content to teach his disciples and leave the stubborn world to save or damn itself:--enough it would not have been. He had flashed the picture on to the screen of time, but it would have faded. Twenty years of wandering, of indomitability, of disappointment and of ignoring defeat and failure, lay before him: in which to make his creation, not a momentary picture, but a carving in jade and granite and adamant. It is not the ever-victorious and successful that we take into the adyta of our hearts. It is the poignancy of heroism still heroism in defeat,-- "unchanged, though fallen on evil years," --that wins admittance there. Someone sneered at Confucius, in his latter years, as the man who was always trying to do the impossible. He was; and the sneerer had no idea what high tribute he was paying him. It is because he was that: the hero, the flaming idealist: that his figure shines out so clear and splendidly. His outer attempts--to make a Man of Marquis This or Duke That, and a model state of Lu or Wei--these were but carvings in rotten wood, foredoomed to quick failure. All the material of the world was rotten wood: he might have learned that lesson;--only there are lessons that Such a One never learns. Well; we in turn may learn a lesson from him: applicable now. The rotten wood crumbled under his hands time and again: under his bodily hands;--but it made no difference to him. He went on and on, still hoping to begin his life's work, and never recognising failure; and by reason and virtue of that, the hands of his spirit were carving, not in rotten wood, but in precious jade and adamant spiritual, to endure forever. On those inner planes he was building up his Raja-Yoga; which time saw to it should materialize and redeem his race presently. Confucius in the brief moment of his victory illuminated the world indeed; but Confucius in the long years of his defeat has bowed the hearts of twenty-five centuries of the Black-haired People. We can see this now; I wonder did he see it then? I mean, had that certain knowledge and clear vision in his conscious mind, that was possessed in the divinity of his Soul--as it is in every Soul. I imagine not; for in his last days he--the personality-- could give way and weep over the utter failure of his efforts. One loves him the more for it: one thinks his grandeur only the more grand. It is a very human and at last a very pathetic figure--this Man that did save his people.