a sense deified, with a distinction in Latin-things appertaining to the manes were religiose, and to the gods above, sacræ. It was the duty of the Pontifex Maximus to see that they were propitiated by proper ceremonies, and besides libations of wine, animals, especially such as those which the deceased was fond of when alive, were sacrificed. Now in Chinese house-shrines there is just this double worship of penates and lares; the tablets of some of the greater Taoist gods standing side by side with the ancestral tablets, the latter, however, being on the right, or less honourable place, and being called "family gods," whereas the others are called "great gods;" but the cere monies and reverence offered to each are identical. It is interesting to notice how, eighteen centuries ago, the vigorous young Christianity went far beyond Genoa, and, I fear, beyond very many Christian homes in England and America. In Dr. Smith's Dictionary of Christian Antiquities, under the article, "The Family," we read that "the abnegation of idolatry caused a displacement of the household and hearth gods-the penates and lares of the Romans-together with all family rites which savoured of idol worship, and the substitution of Christian observances in their stead. And as it seems to have been a custom of the religious Romans to offer their prayers the first thing in the morning in the "lararium," or household shrine, so family prayer, in which the different members of a Christian household joined, appears to have had its place from the beginning of the new religion. Clemens Alexandrinus speaks of the "two or three meeting in the Saviour's name," as meaning husband, wife, and child; and he mentions prayer and Scripture reading in Christian families. Neander tells us further that, "The memory of departed friends was celebrated by their relations, husbands or wives, on the anniversary of their death, in a manner suited to the spirit of the Christian faith and Christian hope. It was usual on this day to partake of the Communion, under a sense of the inseparable fellowship of those who had died in the Lord, and a gift was laid on the altar in their name, as if they were still living members of the Church. And later still, the birthdays of martyrs, their days of release, that is, from the burden of the flesh into the glorious life of immortality, were celebrated by whole communities. Great care was bestowed in providing for their funeral obsequies and the repose of their bodies. The people gathered round their graves, when the story was rehearsed of their confession and sufferings." This all too soon exhibited symptoms of the after degenerate and heretical customs, not merely of prayer for the dead, but of prayer to the dead; of excessive and idolatrous veneration, and of trust in their merits and intercession. The elements of Ancestral Worship prevail, I imagine, more or less in almost all heathen religious systems. Sir Gardner Wilkinson assures us that Herodotus is right in stating that the Egyptians differ from the Greeks in paying no divine honours to heroes. But he adds that they allowed a king to pay divine honours to a deceased predecessor, or even to himself, his human doing honour to his divine nature; the Divine being like the Divus Imperator of the Romans, or the Wang-ti of the Chinese. The Malagasy race closely resemble the Chinese in their belief in the separate existence of the human spirit after death. The earliest tradition of any worship in that most interesting island of Madagascar, relates to that which the Vazimba, the supposed aborigines of the central parts of the island, offered to the spirits of the dead; and the present generation of heathen worshippers assemble to offer sacrifice to the manes of the Vazimba. They believe that the "fanáhy," or soul, the immortal part of man, lives on in some manner, and prayers are offered with great respect and honour to ancestral spirits. A Malagasy will lay out far more money on his family tomb than on his own dwelling-house. He will reside in a poor mean structure of clay and split bamboo, but his tomb must be of solid stone. He will wear coarse and cheap material, but his dead relatives must be shrouded in a silk "lamba;" like the Chinese, who clothe their dead in full dress with cap and pipe as in life. And with this same yearning after intercourse and nearness, which perhaps leads the Chinese to bury their dead in their gardens, and to keep the coffined dead often long in the house, the Malagasy in the country build their tombs close to their houses; though (as anticipating the sanitary laws in England) cemeteries in the capital, Antananarivo, have long been closed. There was a curious confusion of custom in ancient Greece as to this manner of burial. Athens and Sicyon, in particular, forbad burial within the walls; whilst in Sparta it was commanded. The most thorough-going in this culture of ancestors are the inhabitants of the Fiji Islands. They believe in the separate existence of the soul after death; and they suppose, as do the Chinese, that its wants closely resemble those in this life. The Chinese believe in the temporary aberration of souls during life-time. "The soul is frightened out," they will say, when by a sudden fright a person becomes dazed and ill. I have sometimes met persons with candles burning, and a gong gently beating, and incantations muttering, walking thus to and fro in the country paths, anxiously searching for and calling to the escaped spirit. The Fijians do the same, and sometimes the ludicrous scene is witnessed of a stout man lying at full length and bawling out for his own soul to return. The ancient Roman custom of calling to the dead by name just after death to bring back, if possible, the spirit, bears a close resemblance to the Chinese custom still observed of going outside the house of mourning, and at the north-west corner of the house crying to the spirit yet hovering near to return. passing bell still rung in England twelve hours after death owes its origin to the idea that the soul does not pass finally away from the body for twelve hours. In Latin the expression, "conclamatum est," came to be a proverb for an occurrence in which no hope remained. But the way in which respect and affection for the departed may be shown is-think, or thought, the Fijians-by making complete for the dead man, with all possible alacrity, in the unseen world, the domestic establishment which he has left. More swift but scarcely best less awful than the Indian suttee is the strangling of the voluntarily immolated wives, slaves, and sometimes parents of the deceased. This custom, called loloku, may have had a religious origin, but at present these sacrifices are not offerings to the gods, but merely to propitiate and honour the manes of the departed. It is strengthened by misdirected affection, joined with wrong notions of a future life. These murdered bodies are called "grass for the grave of the dead." "Altars oft To demons built, or chieftain's cruel ghost, Were heap'd with bones of men, while green and soft The Gospel in Polynesia, Stanza xxvii. Similar and yet more diabolical practices were observed by the Peruvians, under the rule of the Incas, and by the Aztecs, the inhabitants of ancient Mexico. Amongst the latter cremation was practised. (In ancient Greece inhumation was older than cremation; in ancient Rome cremation was older than inhumation; but in both countries both practices were subsequently observed simultaneously.) In Mexico, as now in Dahomey, and all up the Niger, a host of slaves were sacrificed at the obsequies of the rich. In Peru the same human sacrifices accompanied the funeral rites, but the bodies were embalmed, as in Egypt; and Prescott hazards the assertion that the Incas therefore embalmed because they believed in the resurrection of the body. I cannot think that this great doctrine is known to any one save by revelation. It is surely, as Professor Westcott calls it, "The Gospel of the Resurrection." Homer and Eschylus,* indeed, both allude to the rising again of bodies, but only to deny the possibility of it; unless, indeed, the whole myth of the Odyssey be taken to imply belief in the possibility of awakening from the sleep of death.‡ The legend of Hercules wrestling with Death, and rescuing the dead Alcestis, speaks of a resuscitation merely to the old life; not a resurrection, like that of our Lord, to the new and endless life of spiritual existence, or the rising of the ancient buried dust as Christianity teaches. Celsus, indeed, tried to class our Lord's Resurrection with the legendary descents of Zamolxis, Rhampsinitus, Orpheus, Protesilaus, Hercules, and Theseus, into the infernal regions, and their return thence, showing plainly his opinion that such were not resurrections. "Has any one," he asks, "who has been really dead ever risen again?"† The noblest of ancient thinkers, so far from believing in the resurrection of the body, rejoiced in the idea of being free from the body. Plotinus returned thanks that he was not tied to an immortal body. 'Immortality itself was not in ancient belief granted to all men indiscriminately, but only to the greatest." ‡ Aristotle denies, on the strength of a direct analysis, the future personal existence of the soul as a conscious continuance of our present existence, and hence, of course, the resurrection. Plato clothes his instinctive hope in the form of a story; confessing, as it were, that his logical process fails him.* In the Rigvedas, or Brahmin sacred hymns of praise, bearing a date, according to Max Müller, of from 1200 to 1500 B.C., the fathers are invoked almost like gods, and oblations are offered to them. The passages quoted by Max Müller hardly prove the resurrection of the dead as believed by them; neither have I seen the passages from Zoroaster's teaching, which, as Dr. Haug affirms, teach this doctrine. Wordsworth, indeed, commenting on Genesis xlix., says that Joseph ordered the embalming of his father all the more readily, because the Egyptian custom was founded on the primitive belief in the resurrection of the body. Nevertheless, I cannot but think that all these testimonies are mere conjecture; and that life and immortality, resurrection as well as existence, are brought to full light by the Gospel alone. The Chinese say distinctly, "When a man dies he cannot live again." "That a man should rise from the dead was treated by the heathen world as an absolutely incredible fact." + Still it is a very interesting question how far our Lord's argument with the Sadducees, as to the rising again of the dead, should not lead us to regard the idea of the resurrection of the body as inevitably connected with a belief in the immortality of the soul. I cannot understand Professor Westcott's assertion that the separate and individual existence of the soul cannot be imagined as apart from a body; but still, for the soul's exercise and action, and higher nobler life, a body doubtless is required; and that body is but sleeping, soon to awake with the awakening soul to an inseparable immortal life. In Rev. vi. 9, the "souls of them which were slain for the Word of God," are represented as "crying with a loud voice," and afterwards as clothed with white robes. And in the Benedicite, "the spirits and souls of the righteous" are exhorted to "bless the Lord,-to praise Him, and magnify Him for ever." Neither a sublime vision, nor a song of praise, can safely be cited to establish intricate points of doctrine, but surely both of these utterances seem to assume the possibility of the definite limitation of a soul without the boundary of a body. It is possible that the doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which is believed by the Chinese under Buddhist teaching, is an instinctive appreciation of the truth that the life of a disembodied spirit is not true life; a body is necessary, and as resurrection is unknown, a change of residence for the soul is accepted as a possible alternative. But leaving this discussion, which, though somewhat remote, has yet an obvious connexion with our subject, I proceed now to give a brief description of Chinese Ancestral Worship. I do so with relief, for Westcott, Gospel of the Resurrection, p. 188. + Mozley, p. 374. all honour to them-their ancestral rites are for the most part free from such terrific cruelty as that which I have described above. They cannot be said to be absolutely free, for two instances of human sacrifice to spirits are mentioned in the "Spring and Autumn" Annals of Confucius. Chêng She Hwang, the builder of the Great Wall, and the notorious burner of the classical Books of History and Poetry, is said to have caused numbers of slaves to be immolated at his funeral about B.C. 210; and it is said that the barbarous practice of burying ministers alive with the ruler's corpse was introduced by Duke Ching about B.C. 630, when sixty-six persons were buried alive, and 170 with his successor, Duke Muh. Confucius thought that this practice was the result of the ancient custom of burying images of straw, and afterwards of wood, as attendants on the dead; and he condemned the inventor of the ancient rite.* he I may mention in passing the curious jumble into which, in the reign of Kublai Khan, A.D. 1284, ancestral reverence fell. The Khan sent an embassy (so Marco Polo tells us), to Adam's Peak in Ceylon, where according to the Saracens Adam lies buried, though, as Marco Polo sagely remarks, according to the Holy Scripture of our Church, the sepulchre of Adam is not in that part of the world. The idolaters, says, assert it to be the tomb of Sagamoni Borcan, or Shakyamuni, Gautama Buddha - Borcan meaning "Divine." The great Khan, eager to procure some of Adam's hair and teeth, and the dish from which he used to eat, despatched a great embassy. The ambassadors, on reaching the presence of the King of Seilan, were so urgent that they succeeded in getting two of the grinder teeth, which were passing great and thick, and they also got some of the hair, and the dish from which that "personage" (as Marco Polo somewhat irreverently calls our forefather) used to eat, which is of very beautiful green porphyry. They returned with great joy to Cambaluc, or Peking, and the Great Khan, "passing glad," ordered all the ecclesiastics and others to go out and meet the reliques; and the Great Khan averred that the meat placed on this dish shall become enough for five men, and that he had proved this and found it to be true. This dish, says Colonel Yule, was the Patra, or Holy Grail, of Buddhism. It is an odd coincidence that Buddha is actually a canonized saint in the Greek Church and Roman Catholic calendars, for the history of Barlaam and Josaphat, written by St. John of Damascus, in the eighth century, and which was for several centuries one of the most popular works in Christendom, and was translated into all the chief European languages, is simply a modified version of Buddha's history; and St. Josaphat (Nov. 27) is in very deed Gautama Buddha. By way of a reciprocity arrangement, the Buddhists, with blasphemous compliment, include our Lord in their list of saints and genii. It seems just possible that the passage from the Apocryphal Wisdom of Solomon, which I quoted above, and to which the date of B.C. 120-80 is assigned, may have reference to the story * Mencius, i. I. 5. |