He also wrote
a work named "Spring and Autumn, or Chronicles of his Native State of Lu
from 722 B.C., to 481[4] B.C." He "changed his world," as the Buddhists
say, in the year 478 B.C., having lived seventy-three years.
Primitive Chinese Faith.
The pre-Confucian or primitive faith was monotheistic, the forefathers
of the Chinese nation having been believers in one Supreme Spiritual
Being. There is an almost universal agreement among scholars in
translating the term "Shang Ti" as God, and in reading from these
classics that the forefathers "in the ceremonies at the altars of Heaven
and earth ... served God." Concurrently with the worship of one Supreme
God there was also a belief in subordinate spirits and in the idea of
revelation or the communication of God with men. This restricted worship
of God was accompanied by reverence for ancestors and the honoring of
spirits by prayers and sacrifices, which resulted, however, neither in
deification nor polytheism. But, as the European mediaeval schoolmen have
done with the Bible, so, after the death of Confucius the Chinese
scholastics by metaphysical reasoning and commentary, created systems of
interpretation which greatly altered the apparent form and contents of
his own and of the ancient texts.
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