But it has been reserved for the latest English translator of the Analects, the Rev. Mr. Jennings, to level some of the worst charges at his head. To begin with, he approvingly quotes, as Legge's final opinion on Confucius, words occurring in the earliest edition of the Chinese Classics to the effect that he is "unable to regard him as a great man," quite heedless of the fact that the following stands in the edition of 1893 (two years before his own translation appeared): "But I must now leave the sage. I hope I have not done him injustice; the more I have studied his character and opinions, the more highly have I come to regard him. _He was a very great man_, and his influence has been on the whole a great benefit to the Chinese, while his teachings suggest important lessons to ourselves who profess to belong to the school of Christ." This summing-up, though certainly unexpected in view of much that has gone before, does partly atone for the unjust strictures which Dr. Legge felt it necessary to pass on Confucius at an earlier period, though it may require many years entirely to obliterate their effect. What I wish to emphasise at present, however, is the unfairness of quoting an early and presumably crude and ill-considered opinion in preference to the latest and maturest judgment of an authority who at no time can be said to err On the side of over-partiality for his subject. But this is not all. For after pointing out, truly enough, that Confucius cannot well be blamed for "giving no impulse to religion," inasmuch as he never pretended to make this his aim, Mr. Jennings goes on to pick some holes on his own account, and incontinently falls into exactly the same error that he had previously rebuked in Dr. Legge. "In his _reserve_ about great and important matters, while professing to teach men, he is perhaps most to blame, and in his holding back what was best in the religion of the ancients." What these great and important matters were, is not made very clear, but if, as seems probable, the phrase is simply another way of referring to "the religion of the ancients," it can only be repeated that religion was a subject which he disliked to discuss and certainly did not profess to teach, as is plainly indicated in the Analects. And the reason why he refrained from descanting on such matters was that, knowing nothing of them himself, he felt that he would have been guilty of hypocrisy and fraud had he made a show of instructing others therein. Would that a like candour distinguished some of our own professed teachers of religion!