present positions, and to show how Protestant missionaries can at least make their position far more enviable than is the case at present. But first a word must be said about China herself, so that her point of view may be understood.

The religions of China are very hard to deal with rapidly, for they are largely the unfinished results of the curious history of the country. In very remote times the early Chinese fathers possessed a religion-if the ancient State worship still rigidly adhered to proves anything-singularly pure and free from the degrading practices which the lapse of time and the insufficiency of the old cult allowed to grow up. The earliest thoughts on religion of the Chinese have been sought in their primitive written characters, and an analysis of these characters has allowed sinologues to understand something of the thoughts of a period as remote as five thousand years ago. An examination of five primitive

characters has been held sufficient to establish incontestable proofs that the early Chinese were monotheists, and that only nature worship and a system of superstitious divination ended by entirely corrupting the original purity of their beliefs. Clear conceptions of Heaven, the Supreme Being, manifestation or revelation, the spirits or Manes of departed men, were all possessed by the early Chinese, and it was because these were too vague in the minds of the masses that other practices of a debasing sort were resorted to with greater and greater frequency by the common people.

As time went on the peculiar nature of the Chinese mind began gradually but surely to give these debased conceptions, which were at first vague and shadowy, definite shape. In the Shu-Ching, a compilation of historical documents and the oldest of Chinese books, it is plain that side by side with the old monotheism an inferior worship of spirits had grown up. In these documents it is recorded that the illustrious Emperors Yao and Shun, both of whom reigned some four thousand years ago, sacrificed not only to God, but also to the hills and rivers, and that this worship extended to the host of spirits. To the Chinese mind, always grouping everything in regular tiers from the superior to the inferior, it did not seem surprising that, subordinate to the homage due to the Supreme Being, an inferior worship should be extended to all the spirits of those things which had been created by that Supreme Force.

A thousand years later than the reigns of these Emperors, Yao and Shun, it is clear from the language used in the declarations made during the sacrifices offered by the sovereign that the Chinese had travelled considerably farther away from their original conceptions. The Emperor still sacrificed at the round altar to Heaven and at the square altar to Earth, but, although this homage existed, it was plain that the organised worship of spirits had much corrupted the original purity. Divination, spirit worship and ancestor worship must have made immense strides by this time with the common

people, and made them all but ignorant of their first conceptions of God. It was sufficient that the Emperor, Son of Heaven, should pay homage to the Supreme Being, whilst they, the common people, must content themselves with an inferior worship. That all nature was conceived to be a manifestation of God, and to be peopled with spirits superintending and controlling its different parts, was now clearly the general idea; and in their ancestor worship the common people further proved that they considered all life a mere tissue of births, a conception of which the natural corollary appeared to be respect to the dead, who had created the living. And there is another point. The division of the entire Chinese community into four great classes of the officials, the agriculturists, the mechanics or workers, and the traders or merchants is very ancient, and in none of these classes is there any indication of a priesthood. The Emperor himself in his State worship presided as the parent and representative of his people, and was never in any sense a priest. He merely acknowledged the dependence of all on the Supreme Being for life, and by humbling himself sought the favour of Heaven for himself and his people. Thus, whilst the worship of God devolved on the head of the State, the inferior worship of spirits was indulged in by Emperor and people alike.

It was whilst these religious practices were in serious danger of being much harmed by the corruption of the times that Confucius was born, in

the sixth century before Christ. Looking about him, he saw disorder and dissension everywhere, The feudal States were warring with one another; the people were oppressed, and the old books and learning were scoffed at by all. Confucius set himself promptly to work as the champion of the old, and, taking the history of the illustrious times of the Emperors Yao and Shun as his text, he sought to impress on his disciples and all those he was brought into contact with, the desire to revive the Golden Age. Filial piety and the worship of parents became immediately part of the Confucian system, That everyone was but a link in an endless chain of human beings was a theme on which he was never tired of dwelling. The gospel of Confucius was, therefore, of a peculiar order which has given rise to doubt in many minds as to whether his teaching is a religion or a philosophy. It is neither the one nor the other in the strictest sense of the words, but rather an odd mixture of both, compounded in a way specially dear to Chinese minds. It is too

materialistic to be termed a religion, and yet too spiritualistic to be a philosophy. It may be said, perhaps, that Confucius wrote in a strain only to be familiar in Europe twenty-five centuries later.

The Confucian revival-for it was nothing elseended by re-establishing in the minds of the literati the ideas of obedience and respect for the throne, and in the minds of the common people the necessity for preserving carefully those relations which had held together the Chinese social structure.

In