what we at least would call religious worship. People were prayed to. Thanks were given to them. I remember that an ode written at the time of great famine and drought over the land, speaks of offerings made to the spirits. The living ruler says, "I have made my prayer to God, and He does not hear. I have worshipped in the proper way all the former rulers and ministers of state, and they do not help." But when we study those ancient books what we find is this, that there are different kinds of worship; but above all there is the one heaven and one God, alone, unapproachable. Now there is no measuring the gulf between spirits and God. The ancient religion of China certainly is not based on the worship of spirits, and to find any connection whatever between the worship of those spirits and the worship of God is impossible. The more you study the subject the more you will see that to regard one as the result of the other would be a great mistake. But when we come down to the time of Confucius then we find a different state of things. We find then, in the Confucian writings, no alteration of rites and ceremonies. He says, "I am one who hands down; I am not an inventor." Everything that was done in the old dynasty had to be done in the same way. You cannot find anything like a trace of worship of spirits as gods. On the contrary you find all that Confucius cared about was the homage. paid to the ancestors as a token of filial piety. It seems to me we should find this subject well worth study; but as regards the present day belief of China all I can say is I found it extremely difficult to discover what a Chinaman does believe. It is a mixture of Confucianism, Buddhism and Taouism. He believes everything in a way, but hardly anything in reality. He has a vague belief that something may come after this life that may be judgment, and no doubt they believe in ghosts and in the mischief they do, and their power to do evil. All these things are confused in his mind, which is pervaded by a superstition from which he cannot get himself freed. Colonel HENDLEY, C.S.I.-I would ask how this worship was arrived at, which seems so old, and how long has the need for offerings extended? Has it extended from father to grandfather, and so on to remote degrees? I should also like to ask whether the Chinese regard their ancestors in the same light as protecting spirits and is this the reason why they worship them? The lecturer says in his lecture that their respect for spirits was due to their holding property. There was a discussion about this some years ago, when Dr. Yates said it did not exist, and Dr. Smith opposed, believing it to be a mixture of fear and self-love, and that it is only a gradual process that leads the Chinaman to become one who reveres his ancestors. Then as to a child being lucky who is born with teeth. A child was brought to me when in India some time ago, who had one tooth when born, and it was considered to be extremely unlucky. I said it did not much matter who thought so; but the tooth was pulled out, and no one would allow their child to marry that child when it grew up. Then as to the ceremonial in regard to departed spirits in the wards of the large hospitals of India, it is a common thing to perform what they consider the necessary rites before the spirit is disembodied and set free and no longer torments the living. That goes on from generation to generation; so that when a man performs the ceremonial over his own father he also remembers his ancestors. The CHAIRMAN, in thanking the author for his paper, referred to parallel cases of ancestral worship in India, which were referred to in the Greek and Latin classics. He had himself seen preserved food for the spirits consisting of ears of corn, locusts and dried dates. Their ideas of the spirit world appeared to be much the same-only the Greek idea seemed to have sprung from the vision of Tartarus that Ulysses had, and the idea that Homer must have taken from the western fields of Asia had become the conception in all nations of the future Hades. A MEMBER.-Can anyone trace how this ancestral worship begun? We are all agreed on this-that all worship begun with a knowledge of the true God, and every form of idolatry and superstition is some corruption of a deviation from the true path, which is not Herbert Spencer's idea of evolution of religion by degrees. Does Mr. Elwin know how ancestral worship began to come in as one of the forms of deviation from true worship? The AUTHOR.-I do not know that there is anything to go upon certainly in China it is lost in far antiquity. They seem from the earliest times to have had this ancestral worship. As to the question of expenditure of thirty millions on ancestral worship it seems an enormous sum, but it has been calculated carefully. We know how many charitable and other societies there are and about how many families. It is supposed that each family spends about 3s. a year on ancestral worship, and taking the population of China at about 400,000,000 we arrive at that figure. Dr. Yates, who has been mentioned, works this out and comes to that conclusion. It is very interesting to hear of these other places where there are parallel instances of ancestral worship. Mr. MARTIN ROUSE.-I do not know whether I am unduly prolonging the debate; but that question surely can be precisely answered. From what I know of oriental antiquity, did not the Assyrians worship Asshur, who the Bible informs us was their first ancestor who began that kingdom, and did not Babylon, as proved by Dr. Pinches, worship Nimrod under the name of Merodach* and Nebuchadnezzar calls him lord of Merodach. So I do not think there can be Those men, who were great a shadow of doubt about that. commanders, and who founded Empires, were doubtless the origin of the worship of ancestors. We heard this afternoon that the first persons we hear of as prayers being addressed to them, were kings and statesmen. That, surely, is only spreading out the first idea. Mr. STORRS TURNER.-But in China you find no Nimrod amongst the deities. Mr. MARTIN ROUSE.-But if they prayed to him as the Assyrians prayed to Asshur, surely that is the original form of ancestral worship. Mr. STORRS TURNER.-I cannot take that view at all. Those are the exceptional cases. The SECRETARY.-It is clear that there is a difference of opinion between Mr. Elwin, who read this interesting paper, and Mr. Turner, whether ancestral worship is idolatrous or not. Mr. Storrs Turner considers it is not so. Mr. STORRS TURNER.-It is in a corrupt stage at the present time, no doubt. The Meeting then closed. * See Trans., vol. xxxv, p. 27. ORDINARY GENERAL MEETING.* REV. CANON GIRDLESTONE, M.A., IN THE CHAIR. The Minutes of the last Meeting were read and confirmed. TWO PATHS, ONE GOAL: Being an Examination of Bishop Temple's Bampton Lectures for 1884. By WALTER AUBREY KIDD, Esq., M.D., M.R.C.S., F.Z.S. TH ILLUSTRATION. HE course of the Ganges-Brahmapootra is without parallel among the rivers of the earth. Rising by two heads from a limited region of the Himalayas it pursues at first two opposite directions. The northern branch flows for 1,800 miles through Tibet, the southeru through the great plain of Hindostan on its fertilising course for 1,500 miles, and this greatest of Asia's twin-streams unites to form the Ganges delta and flows into the Indian Ocean. A common origin, a parallel course, and a common destination may fitly illustrate the still more remarkable origin, course, and destination of Religion and Science as forces in human history. The parallel may be further pursued. How well does the long winding course, much of which is still unknown, of the Brahmapootra, resemble that of Science, and the open, long-known course of the Ganges, so important to Northern India that its work as water-carrier and fertiliser entitles it to rank as the foremost river of the globe, that of Religion? With this illustration in view we may proceed to examine the Bampton Lectures of Bishop Temple on "The Relations between Religion and Science," which represent two paths of human progress with one common goal. * Monday, January 25th, 1904. The time, the subject, and the writer of the Bampton Lectures for 1884 were alike noteworthy. The "Origin of Species" had celebrated its coming of age four years before, and Darwin's greatest champion and swordsman in many an encounter had proclaimed "Evolution is no longer an hypothesis but an historical fact." The challenge of Huxley, for it was no less than a challenge, was couched in his customary trenchant terms, but the saying if it did not then echo the united voice of Science of 1880 fairly well anticipated that of 1903. The year 1884 was one in which it had been recently declared orthodox from the side of Science to hold the general truth of the doctrine of evolution. But for a Bishop of the Established Church to hold this doctrine so publicly announced, still required not less knowledge of the two great subjects of Religion and Science, than of courage. Even so late as 1894 at Oxford, Lord Salisbury, as President of the British Association of Science, made a very powerful attack on natural selection. Here it may be allowable again to state that evolution as new conceived is not Darwinism, or natural selection, though the latter is reckoned as one of its great factors. To the end of his life even Huxley was cautious and slower than many to acknowledge the paramount power of natural selection in organic evolution; too slow for what are called by Weismann "the Hotspurs of biology." So much so that Lord Kelvin, on the occasion of presenting to Huxley in 1894 a medal of the Royal Society, was justified in saying how great was the pleasure all present must feel to have among them the advocate of "the origin of species by natural selection," who once bore down its foes "ready if needs be to save it from its friends." The year 1884 was a critical time for a Bishop to choose for a declaration of his adherence to evolutionary doctrines. To-day such a thing would be received as a matter of course, and probably the accepted views of evolution approach much more closely than ever before the teaching of Scripture as to the origin of the world and the things that are therein. If the time was critical the writer was noteworthy as the protagonist on the Episcopal Bench of the present friendly and candid claims of Science to be attended to by religious and educated men. Here was the contributor to Essays and Reviews of an earlier date, in which he foreshadowed the line of his Bampton Lectures, again speaking in advance of his times! When first he came to the See of Exeter he brought with him a certain cloud of suspicion as a churchman too broad to be safe and sound. But suspicion was slowly disarmed by his wise, |