The Influence of Example
Mencius said, "In the good days of old, men of virtue and talent abounded in the land, and their influence for good was great upon their fellows. But now, alas, the masses of the people are ignorant, and depraved, and their dominant influence is bad."
Counsellors Should Love Righteousness Rather Than Riches
Mencius said, "Those who counsel men in high places should feel contempt for their pomp and display. I have no wish for huge and gorgeous halls, for luxurious food with hundreds of attendants, or for sparkling wine or bewitching women. These things I esteem not; what I esteem are the rules of propriety handed down by the ancients."
FÉNELON
The Existence of God
François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon was born at the château of Fénelon, in the ancient territorial division of Périgord, France, August 6, 1651. At twenty-four he became a priest. He was for many years a friend of his celebrated contemporary Bossuet, but later Bossuet attacked a spiritual and unworldly work of Fénelon, who was condemned by the Pope. He died on January 17, 1715, leaving behind him many books, of which the "Treatise on the Existence of God," first published in 1713, is the masterpiece. This noble and profound work, though it accepts the "argument from design," which the discovery of universal evolution necessarily modifies, does so with such rare philosophical insight as to stand for ever far above any other works of the kind. Fénelon can scarcely be called a mystic, for his reason was of the finest, and never surrendered its claims; but, though a strictly rational thinker, he had the insight of the mystic or the idealist who sees in external nature, and in the mind of man alike, what Goethe called "the living garment of God."