“Confucianism speaks to the _moral_ nature. It discourses on virtue and vice, and the duty of compliance with law and the dictates of conscience. Its worship rests on this basis. The religious veneration paid to ancestors--for that is the worship of this system--is founded on the duty of filial piety. The moral sense of the Chinese is offended if they are called on to resign this custom. “Taoism is _materialistic_. Its notion of the soul is of something physical, a purer form of matter. The soul it supposes to gain immortality by a physical discipline, a sort of chemical process, which transmutes it into a more ethereal essence, and prepares it for being transferred to the regions of immortality. The gods of Taoism are also very much what might be expected in a system which has such notions as these of the soul. It looks upon the stars as divine. It deifies hermits and physicians, magicians and seekers after the philosopher’s stone and the plant of immortality. “Buddhism is different from both. It is _metaphysical_. It appeals to the imagination, and deals in subtle argument. It says that the world of the senses is altogether unreal, and upholds this proposition by the most elaborate proofs. Its gods are personified ideas. It denies matter entirely, and concerns itself only with ideas. Most of the personages adored by the Buddhists are known to be nothing but fictitious impersonations of some of these ideas. The Buddhist worship is not reverence paid to beings believed to be actually existing; it is a homage rendered to ideas, and it is only supposed to be reflex in its effects. Their worship is useful as a discipline, but not effectual as prayer. The Buddhist, if he can obtain abstraction of mind from the world in any other mode, need not pray or worship at all. “These three systems, occupying the three corners of a triangle--the moral, the metaphysical and the material--are supplemental to each other, and are able to co-exist without being mutually destructive. They rest each on a basis of its own, and address themselves each to different parts of man’s nature. It was because Confucianism ‘knew God, but did not honor Him as God,’ that the way was left open for a polytheism like that of the Buddhists. In the old books of China, God is spoken of as the Supreme Ruler. He is represented as exercising over mankind an infinitely just and beneficent providence. But the duty of prayer is not enjoined. No worship of God by the people is permitted. It was only by the emperor acting vicariously for the people that the Deity was adored in that country. The system of Confucius, wanting this, was more a morality than a religion.