The commercial man will tell you that the Chinese are materialists--people who have no faith; and yet with glorious inconsistency he will explain that the difficulty of using Chinese labour abroad is that even the commonest coolie demands that his body shall be repatriated and shall lie in some place which will not hinder his son doing filial {148} worship to his spirit. The whole question of what the race believes is rendered more difficult of comprehension to a Westerner by the confused nature of that belief, and is complicated by the characteristic of the Chinese of mixing all religions together regardless of their natural incongruity. It is hoped that the reader will bear this in mind during the following explanation. The religions of China are usually classed as three. Not three well-marked religions in our sense of the word, but three elements which tend to merge into a common religion. There are separate religions. A large number of Chinese, for instance, are Mohammedan, and they neither marry nor are given in marriage to the other Chinese; there is a very small Jewish community; and there is also a native Greek Christian village still tolerated by the Chinese, which was transplanted from Siberia as the result of a Chinese conquest in the days of Peter the Great; there are a quarter of a million Christians converted by non-Roman missions, besides a million belonging to the Roman Catholic Communion. But Christianity, Judaism, and Mohammedanism put all together, form but a small part of the Chinese community, and the greater part of China believes, according to all orthodox expositors, in three religions--Buddhism, Taoism, and what is termed Confucianism.