[43] She King, i. 7. 2.
[44] Not literally a child. "Little child" is the usual style of Chinese rulers when designing to express feelings of modesty and religious reverence.
[45] She King, iv. 1. [iii.] 1.
[46] By far the best European work on the Taò-tĕ-Kīng is that of Victor von Strauss, and I have followed his translation, though not without consulting those of others. I am fully sensible of the inconvenience of a double translation, and I should have preferred to follow Chalmers' English rendering of Laò-tsé, had not the obscurity of his version been so great as to render it almost unintelligible to the general reader. Reinhold von Plänckner's translation errs on the other side by excess of clearness. It is a palpable attempt to force upon the ancient Chinaman a connected system professedly unraveled from the text by the ingenuity of the modern German. It should be used only with extreme caution, or not at all.
[47] It deserves to be noted, as a peculiarity of the Chinese prophets—Confucius and Laò-tsé—that they alone among their peers have left authentic written compositions. The Koran can scarcely be said to have been written by Mahomet, in the sense in which we talk of writing a book. And neither Zarathustra, Jesus, nor the Buddha, were authors. The calmer Chinese temperament permitted, in the case of these two great teachers, a mode of conveying instructions which is repugnant, as a rule, to the fervid prophetic nature. Observe that of the Jewish (so-called) prophets, those who committed their prophecies to writing, generally belonged to a comparatively late age, in which oral prophecy was no longer in vogue, and the state of feeling that had inspired it no longer prevalent.
[48] The former view is that of Stan. Julien; the latter that of von Plänckner.
[49] Ch. 51. I have borrowed some expressions from Chalmers. O. P.
[50] Ch. 25. For the sake of enabling the reader to compare the interpretations of this important chapter given by various Sinologues, I subjoin in an appendix four other translations.
[51] Ch. 55. Von Strauss explains this to mean that he is like the child in its unconsciousness of danger from these sources.
[52] Or Compassionateness. Chalmers translates "compassion," but this term denotes the sentiment rather than the virtue.