majesty, and an Emperor whose very name is so divine that he scarcely likes to use it; and behind the clan leaders are many beings borrowed from Buddhism, relics of old idolatry, muddled up with Taoism; and in the dim and distant background is the Supreme Being--the Supreme Being Who rewards the just and punishes the unjust, Who can in no way be deceived, Who refuses the rain to the sinner and makes the land desolate, Who has power to dethrone the earthly Emperor and to place China under a foreign domination. This great and awful power is, however, so far distant that the average Chinaman thinks but little about Him. The Temple of Heaven at Peking is the beautiful shrine of this Supreme Being. Here once a year, after spending a night fasting, the Emperor, as the father of his nation, worships the great God who made heaven and earth. The chief feature of this worship is that it is performed in the open air on a beautiful marble dais. No place in China is quite so lovely; it is the fitting shrine of the beautiful faith of China's most glorious days, a faith which though dormant is not dead. The traveller who stands there should remember that the worship which is here performed is as old as the date of the patriarchs and not un-akin to their religious {156} ideals; and if there are some things which are not sympathetic to the Christian idea, they are subordinate. In the main it is the worship of the One True Being. This faith has no right to be called Confucian. There is great doubt about the faith of Confucius. He is silent about religion, or he refers to it only indirectly; it is no part of his teaching; but his indirect references to it apparently express a belief in a Supreme Being whom he calls "Heaven," a Supreme Being who has an influence on human affairs. He also recognises ancestor worship, but with such a dubious phrase that many Chinese and English scholars have doubted his meaning. Neither is this the faith of all the leading Confucianists in China, many of whom are professedly agnostics in matters of religion, and follow the teaching of Chu; but it is the faith, the ill-understood faith, of the great multitude of thinking and non-thinking Chinamen, and it is looked upon as the State religion of China. Its power over China is universal and yet insecure.