Confucius had shown his students the beauties of honouring their Father and their Mother. They soon began to be more interested in the memory of their departed parents than in the happiness of their children and their grandchildren. Deliberately they turned their backs upon the future and tried to peer into the vast darkness of the past. The worship of the ancestors became a positive religious system. Rather than disturb a cemetery situated upon the sunny and fertile side of a mountain, they would plant their rice and wheat upon the barren rocks of the other slope where nothing could possibly grow. And they preferred hunger and famine to the desecration of the ancestral grave. [Illustration: THE GREAT MORAL LEADERS] At the same time the wise words of Confucius never quite lost their hold upon the increasing millions of eastern Asia. Confucianism, with its profound sayings and shrewd observations, added a touch of common-sense philosophy to the soul of every Chinaman and influenced his entire life, whether he was a simple laundryman in a steaming basement or the ruler of vast provinces who dwelt behind the high walls of a secluded palace. In the sixteenth century the enthusiastic but rather uncivilised Christians of the western world came face to face with the older creeds of the East. The early Spaniards and Portuguese looked upon the peaceful statues of Buddha and contemplated the venerable pictures of Confucius and did not in the least know what to make of those worthy prophets with their far-away smile. They came to the easy conclusion that these strange divinities were just plain devils who represented something idolatrous and heretical and did not deserve the respect of the true sons of the Church. Whenever the spirit of Buddha or Confucius seemed to interfere with the trade in spices and silks, the Europeans attacked the “evil influence” with bullets and grapeshot. That system had certain very definite disadvantages. It has left us an unpleasant heritage of ill-will which promises little good for the immediate future. THE REFORMATION THE PROGRESS OF THE HUMAN RACE IS BEST COMPARED TO A GIGANTIC PENDULUM WHICH FOREVER SWINGS FORWARD AND BACKWARD. THE RELIGIOUS INDIFFERENCE AND THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY ENTHUSIASM OF THE RENAISSANCE WERE FOLLOWED BY THE ARTISTIC AND LITERARY INDIFFERENCE AND THE RELIGIOUS ENTHUSIASM OF THE REFORMATION