 After years of traveling from state to state, trying to advise rulers, Mencius retired from public life. Mencius advocated acceptance of the will of Heaven (2B13); however, he must have been disappointed with his inability to improve government during his lifetime, and this is reflected in the plaintive tone of the closing passage of the Mengzi: “From Confucius to the present time is a little more than one hundred years. It is not long from the era of a sage, and we are close to the home of a sage. Yet where is he? Where is he?” (7B38; Van Norden 2008, 197).