How Teih (the first ancestor of Chow) is not equal to the occasion;

And again (ii. p. 375), in time of a seasonable downfall:

"The heavens overhead are one arch of clouds,

Snowing in multitudinous flakes;

The millets yield abundant crops.

We will sacrifice to our great ancestors;
They will reward us with great blessings,
Long life, years without end."

And once more, in an ode ascribed in the preface-but Dr. Legge thinks erroneously-to the time of King Yen (or B.c. 780), and which he would assign to earlier times, we read thus: "We seek the representatives of the dead, and urge them to eat" (indicating a custom now quite out of vogue, and disused for nearly 2000 years; in fact, now all the sorrowing worshippers constitute themselves representatives of the dead, and eat up what the spirits leave).

"Some slay, some boil (at these sacrifices),

Some arrange, some adjust,

And all the service is complete and brilliant.
Grandly come our progenitors;

Their spirits happily enjoy the offerings.

We are all very much exhausted!

And have performed every ceremony correctly.

The able priest announces,

The spirits have enjoyed your spirits and viands,

They have drunk to the full.

They will reward you with great happiness ;

They will confer on you a hundred blessings;

They give you the choicest favours,

Even myriads of years-life without end.'

The great representative of the dead then rises;

The spirits tranquilly return.

The uncles and cousins

All repair to the private feast;

The musicians all go in to perform,

And give their soothing aid at the second blessing.

Your viands are set forth;

There is no dissatisfaction, but all feel happy.

They drink to the full, and eat to the full.

Great and small bow their heads, saying,

The spirits enjoyed your spirits and viands,
And will cause you to live long."

Now, all this may imply an idea that want of filial piety will procure calamity from Heaven, and the reverse, but it is terribly like gross idolatry.

It is another strange coincidence between the customs of ancient empires, now no more, and those of this old and yet ever young China, that the Romans also had "representatives of the dead" (imagines majorum). In their houses they had images, with casts in wax, of their departed ancestors; but in funeral processions, instead of images

D d

carried before the dead, living members of the family personated their ancestors, walking in the procession with these masks.*

Another custom, unique and singularly interesting, is observed in Hang-chow. This city, depopulated during the Sung dynasty (some 700 years ago), by the bandit Fang, is said to have been colonized from Honan. And on the twelfth day of the seventh moon the people of Hang-chow invite their ancestors from K'ai-fung-foo, the capital of Honan, to a feast. They spread cakes, fruit and tea for their ancient guests, as much as to say, "Your descendants in Hang-chow do not forget you." On the 13th wine and meat are offered; on the 15th wine and vegetables; on the 17th, wine and flesh again; and on this day they take leave of their guests, and respectfully send them on their homeward way. Possibly this immigration from Honan may account for the fact that there are only two ancestral halls to be found in the great city of Hang-chow.

The most touching and beautiful of ancestral rites is the visiting of the tombs; a ceremony which should be performed twice a year, in spring and autumn. Amongst the Romans, at the feralia, held in February, a little earlier than the Chinese feast of Ch'un-ming, which falls in March, or early in April, sacrifices were performed and the tombs adorned with garlands. The Chinese too sweep and garnish their graves and the shrubs are tended or replanted, and, in the case of the poor, new bamboo shells are put over the coffins. A table is then spread before the tomb; a paper imitation of a tablet, with the name of the departed, is put on it; candles are lighted, incense burnt, and dishes of various kinds set out. After an interval, the chief performer (the elder son of the family) prostrates himself repeatedly before the tablet, with silent prayers or vows; crackers are let off; the viands and tables are taken into the boat, and the whole party returns, the hair of the women and children adorned for once in the year with azaleas and other wild flowers. In a great many instances, a certain acreage of arable or woodland is attached to the family tombs, and this ground is culti vated by the different branches of the family year by year in rotation, the parties to whom the land falls undertaking out of the proceeds of the land to provide for all the ancestral ceremonies, and to keep the family tomb in repair during the year of their tenure. The surplus may be appropriated by the yearly tenant, and as even in the case of the rich one sacrifice costs scarcely more than one dollar, and the year's expenses on sacrifice and ceremonies cannot cost more than from fifteen to twenty dollars at most, the tenure of the land is a very important source of income in some families. The Chinese, however, are not universally deceived by these rites. They have a strange proverb about the gold and silver tinsel money and paper ingots, which are burned in vast quantities (as Marco Polo described in his day) for the benefit of the dead. The trade in this money in Hangchow alone is worth about 240,0007. a year. The proverb runs thus:

Neither must my readers suppose that all the Chinese are dutiful, and that all that glitters is gold. They have a disgraceful proverb, of which they are ashamed, and which possibly arose during some great famine

"You're old, and ought to die by right;
You eat our rice from morn to night."

Yet in very deed, if you take a case of Chinese formalism in ancestral rites and compare it with a case of English formalism at funerals, I cannot but think that the Chinese is more natural, more tender, and at the same time more imaginative. What could be more hollow and unfilial than Dickens' celebrated funeral scene? "Such affectionate regret, sir," says the undertaker, "I never saw. I have orders to put on my whole establishment of mutes; to provide silver-plated handles of the very best description, ornamented by angels' heads of the most expensive dies; to be perfectly profuse in feathers; in short, to turn out something absolutely gorgeous. Anything so filial as this, anything so honourable to human nature, so calculated to reconcile us all to the world we live in, never yet came under my observation." so with gormandizing and heavy drinking, with prancing black horses and waving plumes, with feigned grief and counterfeited sighs, the funeral season passed, and there was an end. But the Chinese, however formal, treat the dead as dead and here, not dead and gone.

And

Now, from this sketch of the original, it will be seen that Ancestral Worship, whether in modern practice or in ancient institution and observance, is idolatrous. I cannot believe that any Chinese worshippers can understand the subtle distinction of the Roman Catholics between Xarpeia, divine worship, and Sovλeia, the worship offered to saints; for, as I have noticed above, the ceremonies and sacrifices are precisely similar in either case, only perhaps more fervent before ancestral tablets, even as in Italian churches the shrines of Mary and the saints are crowded with offerings and worshippers, and the shrine and image of Jesus Christ comparatively neglected. It is very possible that the ancient Chinese practice was prayer for their departed ancestors, and that this has degenerated into prayer to them; just as in the ancient liturgies of Basil, Nazianzen, Chrysostom and others, there are prayers for the saints, and the Roman Catholic Church has perverted this into prayer to them. And yet in earlier days of the Church of Christ in all probability even prayer for the dead was not practised. "The Christians of Smyrna (in the narrative of Polycarp's death, c. xvii.) draw a careful distinction between their love (ayan@uev) for the martyrs, and their worship (oéßeobai, πроσкννоÛμеν) of the Saviour." This truth is illustrated in a recent poem "The victory that overcometh the world," (from the notes to which I quote the above paragraph), by the Rev. H. C. G. Moule. After describing St. Paul's martyrdom, we read

"Near to the place of death his body lies
Buried by us. Oft round the blessed grave,

(If so the persecutor's wrath permit,)
We mean to gather when the shadows fall,

Or noontide stillness consecrates the field,

To sing our praises (Laudatio funebris, λóyos éñiтápios, as the Greeks and Latins called such orations).

Not to the dear dead,

Though venerable, but rather to His Name

Who is our Life and Victory."

The Roman Catholic custom of saint worship, while forbidding Ancestor worship, is of course defensible from their stand-point. Without touching for a moment the question of the salvability of the heathen, we may safely assert that the heathen ancestors of the Chinese can never be imagined as mediators and intercessors with God; whereas Mary, Peter, and all the saints are believed to be such by the Roman Catholic creed, as having been eminent servants of the Most High. It is reasonable, I say, from their stand-point. But how very near that stand-point is to blasphemy, and how wholly depreciatory it is of our Lord and Master I need not pause to notice. Man's one Mediator needs no mediator between Him and the souls He came by mediation and atonement to save.

"All worship is prerorative, and a flower

Of His rich crown, from whom lies no appeal
At the last hour;

Therefore we dare not from his garland steal.
To make a poesy for inferior power."-HERBERT.

"To all saints and angels."

Now, if we could but find an ancient form of this Chinese custom of Ancestral Worship, free from sacrifice and free from worship and adoration, we might hope for a reformation of modern degeneracy, and could then more charitably bear with some of its present observances. But unfortunately the further you stretch back into remote and hoary antiquity the more distinct and unblushing are the examples and precepts enjoining sacrifice and the invocation of ancestors, precisely with the forms and ceremonial employed when invoking God. And however much Confucius may have contrived to lead his western and barbarian critics to doubt his own regard for the custom, reformation is impossible while these ancient examples remain. I cannot but believe that the origin of the practice was pure, reverent, and to be honoured. I daresay Dr. Legge has good authority for saying that sacrifice is a comparatively modern adjunct of the ancestral rites. But I have not found the proofs; and with Shun twothirds up the cataracts of the time of man's life on earth offering animals in sacrifice to his ancestors, the search save by conjecture seems somewhat hopeless.

It is only fair to state here that another very high authority. on Chinese customs and beliefs, Dr. Edkins, informs us that "so far from dignifying their ancestors with divine attributes, or believing them to exercise a beneficent providence, they believe them to be less happy than in lifetime. Their happiness depends on the honour paid to them by their worshippers." How far this view is supported by the evidence which I have adduced above I must leave my readers to judge. Dr. Edkins adds, and his words convey a view similar to that held by Aristotle, "The time of a soul's enjoyment as a conscious individual

has passed at death. It is only during the period of union with the body that it can be called happy, except in receiving," as the doctrine. of Altruism teaches, "the approval and reverence of posterity." Yet surely this last necessitates the idea of conscious individuality.

Another learned Sinologue, Canon M'Clatchie, assures us that " Shun is no other than Nimrod, and that Shun or Nimrod brought to a climax the apostasy from the God of Noah by worshipping his deified ancestors, i. e. by worshipping Noah as head of the house." Without pretending to pronounce an opinion on this view, and the deductions from it, I may remark that it only strengthens what I have said as to the hopelessness of finding a pure form of ancestral reverence in China. It is impure by the witness of Chinese classics up to Shun; and Shun is in reality not a Chinaman at all, but outside Chinese history proper!

This practice presents an immense obstacle to Christianity. Founded as it is on principles which man's nature and God's law approve-love for parents, reverence for age, and remembrance of the departed— rooted as it is yet more deeply in the affections and fears of the people by selfish desire for a participation during lifetime in ancestral lands, and after death in the ancestral feasts; perpetuated as it is by custom, custom which 1700 years ago Clemens Alexandrinus attacked as the agency which induces men to drink to excess, to commit injuries, to deify dead men, and worship idols ;* when by the abandonment of ancestral rites conscience seems wounded and self-interest sorely injured, no wonder that tens of thousands turn away from the requirements of Christianity; "Thou shalt have none other gods but Me. Thou shalt not bow down to them nor worship them." "See thou do

it not; for I your remote ancestor am a man.

Ten years ago I used to visit an aged Christian. He belonged to a large clan, and for the first time since his baptism the ancestral land fell to his lot for the year 1867. He informed the headman of the clan that he could not worship his ancestors, and he was told in reply that if he refused to perform the customary rites, he should not touch the land. And observe now the action of this rice Christian, as some ignorant Christian critics are wont to call converts from amongst the heathen. What said this poor cringing paid adherent of a foreign Church? He waited not to consult me sixty miles away, nor even to ask the catechist's advice three miles off; but declining on these terms to have anything to do with the property, he told the headman that he would rather beg than deny his Master; and he gave up cheerfully what would that year have produced 20 to 30 dollars clear profit, a great help for his declining years.

Yet surely this complex nature of Ancestral Worship, its foundation in filial piety which I cannot but believe God has honoured in the long life of the Empire, and the defilement of the custom by idolatrous practices, seems to suggest the desirability of our substituting in our Christian Churches some such observances as those which were instituted in the early Church.

Christian Oratory, H. M. M., p. 72.