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The excerpt represents the core issue or deciding factor on which you must meditate, and is drawn from The Soul of the Far East by Percival Lowell: obedience bears to that of children elsewhere is paralleled perhaps
sufficiently by the comparative importance attached to precepts on
the subject in the respective moral codes. The commandment "honor
thy father" forms a tithe of the Mosaic law, while the same
injunction constitutes at least one half of the Confucian precepts.
To the Chinese child all the parental commands are not simply law to
the letter, they are to be anticipated in the spirit. To do what he
is told is but the merest fraction of his duty; theoretically his
only thought is how to serve his sire. The pious Aeneas escaping
from Troy exemplifies his conduct when it comes to a question of
domestic precedence,--whose first care, it will be remembered, was
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