The Oldest Family

Confucius, the founder of the Confucian religion of China, lived 551 to 478 B.C. He was contemporary with the Tarquins of Rome, Pythagoras of Greece, and Cyrus of Persia.

His descendants form the aristocracy of China, and have always enjoyed high privileges. There are still some forty thousand of them, seventy generations removed from their ancestor; this being the oldest family in the world, unless we consider the Jews a single family descended from Abraham.

There are sixteen hundred and sixty temples erected to the memory of Confucius, or Kung-Fu-tsee, in China, the largest one covering ten acres of land.

He is the patron saint of that vast empire; and the doctrine he promulgated forms the state religion of the nation, sustained by the whole power of the emperor and the literary body.

Yet it is a religion without priests or liturgy. Morality and reverence are its chief characteristics.

"Worship as though the Deity were present." "If my mind is not engaged in my worship, it is as though I worshipped not." "Faithfulness and sincerity are the highest things." Reverence for parents, or the aged, was as imperative in his teaching as reverence for the Deity; and the Golden Rule in its negative form is found in his writings,--"Do not unto others what you would not have them do unto you."

The religion of Confucius is an ethnic religion, or one confined within the boundaries of a particular race or family of mankind. It belongs to China and the Chinese. It has been their state religion for some twenty-three hundred years, and it rules the opinions of three hundred millions of men. But, out of China, Confucius is only a name.

There are two other forms of religion in China,--Taoism, and Buddhism in its Chinese form.