So shadowy a figure as the Chou ruler of that time could not fulfil what Confucius required of the "Son of Heaven".

He had yet to learn the strength, of the Scotch prejudice against bishops; perhaps to learn that the more shadowy the grounds of dispute, so much the more keenly are ecclesiastical squabbles fought.

"That morning," he wrote, "comes back to me with all the vagueness of a dreamyou will know what morning I mean, and why it fills so shadowy a page in the book of my memory.

Nothing can be, in the strictest sense of the word, more comic than to set so shadowy a thing as the conjectures made by the vaguer anthropologists about primitive man against so solid a thing as the human sense of sin.