ruler of the world, by the terms Shang te, Teen, &c. in the preceding manifestoes, as well as in other sections of that Book. There are, however, good reasons for believing that we should wrong him by assuming the existence of any dishonesty on his part. He approached the subject under circumstances very different from ours. We are trained from infancy to think of the world and ourselves as produced by the will of a personal God, "our Father in heaven;" and when we come, in the literature of another people, upon indications of some kind of Ruler, whose more special residence is said to be heaven, we are very apt to endow him at once with all the well-known attributes of the God of the Bible -in particular with will and personality. Further, our acquaintance with the beliefs of a large number of very different peoples, great and small, of ancient and modern times and of every grade of barbarism and civilization, has taught us that religion is natural to the human mind. In all men is inherent a faculty of reverence, to gratify which they picture to themselves gods or a God, whom they endow with the highest attributes that their mental cultivation enables them to form a conception of; and to whom they appeal in times of distress. With this knowledge, we cannot avoid concluding that the ancient Chinese must, like all other peoples, have had their gods, probably a chief god, possibly a one only God, whom it is not easy for us to conceive as other than as a thinking and willing Being. Hence the passages of the Shoo king from which I have quoted have no difficulty for us. Nothing of this was, however, the case with Choo tsze. Personal deities were indeed known to him from his infancy, among others a Shang te. But these were, all of them, idols in the Buddhist and Taouist temples; and it was impossible for a mind like his to believe that the wise and able monarchs of ancient times could have solemnly worshipped such things. Again he, unlike us, knew few foreign peoples, and these few, very imperfectly. He could not therefore know that the religious faculties, being inherent in all men, must have had objects for their

satisfaction in the days of Ching tang and Woo wang, as in his own times. Taken altogether, the circumstances in which he was placed were likely to lead a man of his great intelligence to suppress the religious tendencies of his own nature; and to adopt that theory of the development of the universe from one unintelligent and will-less principle, which Chow tsze had based on the sacred Yih king. We know from experience what a wonderful capacity even the most candid minded men possess for mis-seeing facts, that conflict with systems of belief which they have conscientiously adopted, and which give satisfaction to their intellectual and moral needs; and we can consequently understand how Choo tsze could manage to see in Shang te, Teen and Shang teen, as used in the Shoo king, nothing but some additional appellations of the Ultimate Principle. He was frequently questioned by his immediate scholars, and by his correspondents as to the qualities of hearing, seeing, protecting, commanding, &c. ascribed to Shang te and Teen, and his answers are all to the effect that such expressions were used figuratively. His interpretations of the Sacred Books having been adopted by the intelligence of the country, it follows that, for the educated Chinese of the present day, these Books, the sole standard of their beliefs, ignore everything like a God. All cultivated Chinese are-intellectually at least strict and conscientious atheists. But however consistent in their views, as taken by the bare understanding, it is impossible for them practically to repress the action of their naturally inherent religious faculties. Argue with them, and you find them unmistakeably atheists. Let them talk themselves about the vicissitudes of human affairs and about their own. lot in life, and you find them influenced by a belief in Teen as a supreme, intelligent, rewarding and punishing power, with more or less of will and personality. Theoretically they are atheists; practically they are pantheists or even deists.

There exists, indeed, a state worship, which has descended from the earliest times. It consists of an adoration of heaven

and earth, of the sun and moon, of certain mountains and rivers and other natural objects. The service, fixed by Imperial regulation, is performed by the Emperor and his officials. The people have no share in it; and the Emperor alone is permitted to worship the highest objects, heaven and earth. Further, as the state worship is associated with no theological doctrines, but is a mere ceremonial; and as it exercises no influence on the national principles of morality and legislation, it does not fall within the scope of this volume to furnish details regarding it.*

While remembering that the state ritual-worship concerns the officials only, and more especially the highest official, the Emperor, the reader must bear in mind that what is said above, of theoretical atheism and practical pantheism or deism, refers mainly to the educated classes of Chinese. The uneducated require something grosser for the satisfaction of their religious cravings than that the overruling power called Heaven; of which their uncultivated intellects find it difficult to form a sufficiently distinct conception. This circumstance it is, which has obtained for Buddhism and Taouism, with their idols, a general acceptance among the poorer classes of Chinese men, and among all Chinese women; the most wealthy of which latter obtain little mental cultivation. But even the uneducated Chinese, the habitual idol-worshippers, are perfectly well aware of the paramounce of the over-ruling Teen or Heaven. They will, for instance, blurt out into laughter in the presence of their most honored idol if a foreigner, with assumed gravity, discourses of him as the person in virtue of whose "ming or will" the Emperor reigns. And here we have the simple explanation of what seems to us, with our notions of the high attributes of a "god," so irrational a proceeding in China, viz. the occasional promotion of a god by an Imperial decree. Not only

In Chapters XIV. and XV. of Davis' China, the religions and superstitions of the Chinese, as distinguished from the national philosophy and morality, are amply and satisfactorily handled.

is Teen, Heaven, the paramount power, in virtue of whose "Will" the "Jin keun, the Sovereign of Men" reigns; but the latter has, as the "Teen tsze or Teen le, the Son or Officer of Heaven," the power to promote all lesser objects of worship. In short, the devout, uneducated Chinese, man or woman, habitually adores and supplicates the idol-god in preference to Heaven, just as we see in Bavaria or Italy the devout, but mentally unenlightened Romanist habitually adore and supplicate the images of the saints in preference to God; both being, the whole time, fully conscious of the existence of the Supreme Power, Heaven or God.

The two words of my list-to return to the synonyms of the Ultimate Extreme - which appear to have given the most trouble to Occidental Sinologues are Taou and Ching. The real meaning of the latter they have altogether failed to perceive; while with respect to Taou, they have not perceived, or have not sufficiently realized the fact that, even in philosophical treatises, it has several distinct meanings. These two words, Ching and Taou, play a great part in the Chung yung, one of the Four Books, and the most important of the Chinese works bearing on psychology. Speaking generally, the object of the Chung yung is to show, first, the identity of the Ultimate Principle with Man's Nature; and secondly, the high results of the complete, personal realization of the Ultimate Principle by the Holy Man; who is then held up as an exemplar for all future ages. Now Ching is the word used to express the Ultimate Principle as realized in the Holy Man; a superlative being sometimes added to indicate unmistakeably its completest realization.

Of the Chung yung, Sir John Davis says that it contains "much that is extremely obscure and sometimes almost unintelligible The best translation is that by Abel Rémusat, late professor of Chinese at Paris: but his version has been properly censured for being rather too verbal, and for too close an adherence to the mere letter of the text in a work which of all others, in that language, requires to be

illustrated with some degree of freedom in order to make it intelligible."

Rémusat renders Ching by vérité, véritablement parfait, perfection, perfection morale, perfection de la vertu, &c. But I may spare myself further comment after informing the reader, that Rémusat, in the preface to his translation, states:"Les Missionaires [Romanist] ne nous ont donné, sur la métaphysique Chinoise que des notions imparfaites et fort superficielles: mon projet est d'y revenir quelque jour, si je parviens à en débrouiller le chaos." Imagine a Frenchman making a translation of one of the most abstruse of Hegel's treatises, without having mastered his system! Yet the German-French Dictionaries are perfection in comparison with our best Chinese dictionaries.

Another French translation of the Chung yung has since been made by M. Panthier. It is a queer production, a sort of mixture of text and annotation inaccurately rendered; and is on the whole not equal to the older version by Rémusat. Nevertheless M. Huc quotes from it by way of giving Occidentals an idea of the original! A word may have several meanings, but in one place it can only have one. Yet in one place, M. Panthier renders Ching by no less than three distinct significations, viz. by "Le parfait, le vrai, dégagé de tout mélange;" in another place he renders it by "la perfection morale ou la vérité sans mélange ;" in a third by “l'état de perfection;" and in a fourth by "le parfait ou la perfection," as in the following passage:-"Le parfait est le commencement et la fin de tout les êtres; sans le parfait ou la perfection, les êtres ne seraient pas."

The Chung yung was, with the others of the Four Books, translated into English in 1828 by Mr. Collie, a Protestant missionary. In Mr. Williams' Middle Kingdom published 1848, he quotes from it; and in fact it has not yet been superseded by any better version. Mr. Collie renders Ching by Sincerity, giving the following explanation in a foot-note:"I am quite sensible that our word sincerity does not by any