Here the record turns on a strange rank: a man given every honor of a god who was never made one. The witness wired to this address, Myths & Legends of China (the 1922 compilation), states it flatly — "Confucius himself is not a god" — and then, in the same breath, that "66,000 animals used to be offered to him every year". The reverence ran so high that he "may almost be described" as "the great unapotheosized god of China": worshipped without ever being deified.

The witness draws the line with a philologist’s care. In the Li chi, the Book of Ceremonial, the emperor worshipped Heaven and earth, the officials the hearth, the learned their ancestors; the high powers were called shên (gods) and the ancestors kuei (demons). By that reckoning Confucius belongs not among the gods but "as a demon" — an honored ancestor, not a deity. The grand titles heaped on him, "Former or Ancestral Saint" and even "Accomplished and Illustrious Prince", and "the tablet now seen in the Confucian temples" that in A.D. 1307 replaced his image, all stop short of the one word he is never granted; no record, the witness insists, shows "the great ethical teacher" was ever raised to a god.

What gives the account its weight is that the compiler writes as an eyewitness to the argument still unsettled. He "was present at the lengthy debate which took place on this subject" — whether to make Confucius the God of China — "in the Chinese Parliament in February 1917", where in the end "the motion was not carried". What do we call a reverence that offers animals by the tens of thousands yet withholds the name of god — devotion, or a very old refusal to mistake a teacher for a heaven?