and pagodas, and are now some of the largest landed proprietors in the different localities. They have even gained the right, by the French Treaty, of reclaiming whatever lands and houses belonged to the Christian communities when the persecution and expulsion of the Jesuits took place in the seventeenth century. But besides the hostility of the _literati_ and gentry, other causes are at work to render the labours of our missionaries abortive. Chief among these is one mentioned in a publication by the Church Missionary Society itself, called the _Story of the Fuh-kien Mission_. "Christianity," says Mr. Wolfe, a missionary at Foochow, "would be tolerated too, and the Chinese would be easily induced to accept Christ among the number of their gods, if it could be content with the same terms on which all the other systems are willing to be received, viz. that no one of them claims to be absolute and exclusive truth. Now, as Christianity does claim this, and openly avows its determination to expel by moral force every rival system from the altars of this nation, it naturally at first appears strange and presumptuous to this people."[120] Very similar in old times was the attitude of the Roman polytheism towards the various religions with which it was brought into contact. It was tolerant of all religions and non-religions except (_a_) exclusive and aggressive ones, like Christianity and Judaism; (_b_) national ones, like Druidism; and (_c_) extravagant and mystic ones, like the worship of Isis. So now the Buddhists and Taouists would be ready enough to associate the religion of Christ with that of Buddha or Laoutze, seeing indeed, as they say, little difference between the doctrines of Buddha and of Christ. Buddhism was introduced into China at the very time when in the West the Fall of Jerusalem had set Christianity free from its dependence on Judaism, and enabled it to go forth in its own might, conquering and to conquer, till it became the religion of the whole Roman world. The name of Christ was not heard in China till 600 years later; and it was not till 1575 A.D. that a permanent Jesuit mission was established in that distant land. This being the case, it is not to be wondered at that the Chinese are unwilling to renounce a religion in many respects as pure and as moral a one as the pagan world has ever seen, and one which they have held for eighteen centuries, in favour of a creed, as it would seem to them, of yesterday, and one which the hated foreigner seeks to force upon them at the point of the bayonet; for the war of 1857 _was_ a missionary war, though not by any means an opium war; and it is only by the Treaty of Tientsin that missionaries have any right to preach Christianity in China. Previously to this Christianity had been forbidden by King Yoong-t-ching in 1723, and that edict had never been repealed.