The third religion is generally called Confucianism, and this may easily lead to a great misunderstanding, for under the term Confucianism two very different things are included. First, a belief in the philosophy of Confucius. This for the most part is outside what we are accustomed to call religion, and we shall have occasion to deal with it later on. Secondly, and more commonly, the spiritual beliefs of those who call themselves Confucians, and who, owing to his silence on religion, have to find other authorities for their faith. Sometimes they claim that their faith was the same as the faith of Confucius, that the background of his philosophy was the religion that they believe, but more commonly they accept it without any question. This religion is commonly mixed up both with Buddhism and with Taoism, but its essential doctrine is very distinct and has great weight in China, namely, that the spirits of men who are dead live and have influence over the lives of their descendants. I was told by a Chinese Christian that a religious Chinaman of the lower class never goes out without burning a stick of incense to the tablet of his father, and no one can go through Chinese towns without being impressed by the number of people who in that {154} poor country are kept hard at work manufacturing mock money to be burnt for the use of parents and ancestors. The missionaries find that this doctrine is the hardest doctrine for Christianity to assail; and there are not a few who, despairing of success, suggest that the position must be turned, and ancestor worship must be Christianised and accepted as an essential part of a man's belief. The logical Western mind immediately wants to know what is behind the ancestor; if an ancestor is to have power he can only have it, says the logical Westerner, by being in contact with some higher power. One of the greatest missionaries that China possesses answers this difficulty by saying that the Chinese mind is not the Western mind; that he does not concern himself very much with remote speculation; he has not that itching longing to use the word "why," which is at once the glory and the difficulty of the Western mind, and therefore he looks at the spiritual world much as he looks at the earthly world; the man immediately over him in the town is the magistrate, and, to use the Chinese phrase, "is the father and mother of his people," and so over him in spiritual things is his father and grandfather. Behind the magistrate there is in his distant thought the prefect--the head of the prefecture or Fu town--a being who only comes into his village life when there is trouble and difficulty; he comes to punish, rarely to reward, and so behind his father and grandfather in {155} the spiritual world are the great clan leaders whom he worships at regular intervals with the rest of his clan. In civil government there are in a distant background a Viceroy with awful powers and awful