that this form of belief is one of the earliest in the history of religions; and the fact that from the very beginning it has prevailed in China would seem to favour the notion of that nation's antiquity. It would do so, if there were no other explanation. But there is another explanation, and one which lies nearer to the door. Out of the multitude of possible objects of worship, why should the Chinaman have selected this? In the presence of sun and moon and stars, in the vicinity of mountains and lakes and rivers, in the contact with living kings and existing mighty men, why should he from the outset have fixed his veneration upon something which is neither visible nor present, but departed? It cannot be his reverence for things beyond the earth, for he does not reverence things beyond the earth. The very fact that he has fixed his mind not on celestial spirits but on the spirits of the departed dead, is significant; it shows that in some form his veneration must be connected with the earth. Why, then, with so many earthly things around him, has he put them all aside in order to bestow his reverence on something which is unseen, unheard, impalpable, incognisable by any human sense or through any worldly channel? Does not the reason lie in the nature of the Chinese mind itself? Is it not clear that to the Chinaman the spirits of the past are more venerated than the spirits of the present precisely because his own constitutional tendency is

ever towards the past? We see individual minds of this nature; why not individual nations? The Chinaman's mental constitution is not the effect of his worship; his worship is the effect of his mental constitution. He reverences his ancestors more than his descendants because his mind is by nature retrospective and regressive. The branch of the religious tree is bent backwards because the heart of the. man is bent backwards. I do not believe that to the educated Chinese the worship of ancestors is anything more than a commemorative anniversary, the observance of a festival of gratitude to the memory of the good and great who have passed away. But even as such, it is characteristic, significant of the national intellect. It shows that even in the earliest times, in that age of childhood in which a nation like an individual is generally prompted to press forward, the mind of the Chinaman was true to its future self, and, in strict accordance with its whole subsequent destiny, preferred the yesterday that was gone to the morrow that was coming.

The second form of religious reverence in China is the faith which was revived by Confucius, and which bears the name of its reviver. Put roundly, and expressed in English characters, the doctrine of Confucius may be said to be, the search for an ideal heaven through the rediscovery of a primitive earth.1

1 Confucius himself declares that he cites the patterns left us by the ancients. See Pauthier, Chine, p. 134.

He proposes to lead men to a conception of the heavenly state by leading them back, by causing them to retrace their steps over the road by which they have travelled. The whole gist and marrow of the doctrine is regressiveness. The Chinaman looks out upon the existing aspect of society and he contemplates it with dissatisfaction. He has no hope whatever that his dissatisfaction will be removed by the advance of time; it is to the advance of time that he traces the corruption. Every increase of civilisation, every development of culture, every progress in the arts of life, presents to his mind the aspect of a decline. His perpetual cry is the prayer of the Jewish king, "Let the shadow go back ten degrees." It seems to him that what society wants to make it perfect is a process of divestiture. If man would see in earth a miniature of heaven, he must strip the earth of its adventitious ornaments. He must go back to a time when men dwelt in primitive simplicity. He must make a retrograde movement towards the dawn of civilisation, for in its dawn lies its glory. He must seek those beginnings of life in which communities were united not by the laws of the state but by the instincts of the life, not by bonds from without but by obligations from within. He proposes to revive the patriarchal age to restore the glories of the family, to build the state in its image and to see God in that image. The father is to become again at once

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the king and the priest of the household;1 he is to rule over all and he is to sacrifice for all. Wife and child and domestic servant are alike to be subject to his will; but he in turn is to be subject to their need. Sarah may protest if Abraham should desert her; Jacob may run away if Isaac should forget his fatherhood. It is to be a society founded on reciprocal rights. Ancestral seniority is to confer the right of rule, but juniority is to confer the right of being protected. If the father as sovereign is to wield the highest sceptre, as sovereign also he is to bear the weightiest burden. He is not merely to be the priest for himself but for his household. Every sin of any member of the family is to be the father's sin; he is to bear the burden, he is to meet the penalty, he is to offer the sacrifice; his responsibility is to be proportionate to his power.

Such is the ideal of family life which the follower of Confucius proposes to revive. And when he has revived it, his work is only half done; he has to build into its likeness the fabric of the body politic. He has to construct a state which shall be modelled after the similitude of the household, to rear an empire which shall be fashioned after the image of the family. Here again, as in the life of the family, the summit of power is the summit of sacrifice.

1 Ever since the patriarchal period of China these two offices have been actually united in the Emperor. See Gutzlaff, Chinese History, i. 142, 143.

The emperor is the head of the state, and as such he has almost absolute control, but he is only the king because he is the father of his people. If he is the greatest man in the state, he is also the most burdened strictly speaking, the only burdened man. If a sacrifice has to be presented to heaven, it is the emperor alone who presents it. It is not that the emperor alone is allowed to have his sins forgiven; it is rather that all sins are sins of the emperor. He alone is the sacrificer because only he has been the transgressor. The individual units of the nation. are but the members of the imperial life,1 and the imperial life is answerable for the multitude of individual sins. Such is the Confucian ideal of a kingdom-an ideal never realised, never attempted to be realised in practice, yet existing as an object of imaginary memory. And to crown the whole, the ideal of the kingdom of earth is to the mind of the Chinaman the ideal also of the kingdom of heaven. Other religions have looked forward to their millennium as something which is to be consummated in the golden future; to the follower of Confucius it is something which was realised in the remotest past. To find it he is not required to press forward but to look backward, not to seek the set

1 The emperor himself, viewed as an individual unit or private person, is of no more account than his people; he gets his value purely from his official character. Many emperors have in private not belonged to the school of Confucius. See article in 'Nouveau Journal Asiatique' (1854), iv. 292 sq.