principle in order to secure converts, as the Romanists seem to have done; such a course must be fatal: and, indeed, "these unworthy concessions to the habits of vice and superstition so prevalent in China" have already been a serious obstacle to the spread of the true doctrine;[122] for enquirers have expressed their readiness to join the Church if, like the people belonging to the religion of the "Lord of Heaven" (_i.e._ Romanism), they may continue opium-smoking, and work as usual upon the Lord's Day. So successful in one sense have these tactics been, that the Roman Catholic missionaries claim to have 30,000 converts in the province of Fuh-kien alone, mostly hereditary Christians of the fifth generation. These so-called Christians are, however, very ignorant of Scripture, and in most respects indistinguishable from heathens. For instance, they identify the Virgin Mary with one of their deities called Seng Mu, or Holy Mother, and pay idolatrous worship to her. Such success need not be envied by our missionaries. The two points, then, in which the Roman Catholic missions have had the advantage over Protestant ones are--1st. Their missionaries, especially the earlier ones, were far more able men than the generality of our mission clergy. "You may get men," says a writer to the _Times_,[123] "of average attainments to go abroad as missionaries, just as you get clerks and engineers. But they who adopt propagandism as a means of living--and it is no disparagement to the missionaries that they do so--are not exactly the men to impart a living impulse to the hearts of masses of people. Xaviers and Bishop Pattesons, indeed, appear at intervals to prove that the apostolic spirit is not yet extinct among men; but such exceptional phenomena fail to redeem the common-place character of the ordinary missionary field-force." 2nd. The Roman Catholic faith, by its very oneness, by its remarkable similarity to the institutions of Buddhism, and by its concessions to some of the grosser instincts of the human mind, no less than by having a united and organized Church behind it, cannot fail to commend itself more readily to the minds of the heathen than the more spiritual and independent, but at the same time more narrow and sectarian, beliefs which are all ranked as branches of the Reformed Church. "Thinking[124] they are invading a country as soldiers of the Cross, these young missionaries go forth, denouncing the beliefs, the traditions, the worship of the people, calling on them to curse all that they have ever held sacred, and to accept, on pain of eternal perdition, the peculiar arrangements of beliefs which the missionary has compounded for them, and of which Christianity is one, but not always a very perceptible ingredient; and so the poor heathen, hungering, however unconsciously, for the bread of life, is offered instead the shibboleths of a very Babel of sects." But though they have failed as yet in the