--All the societies of the Far East are founded, like that of Japan, upon ancestor-worship. This ancient religion, in various forms, represents their moral experience; and it offers everywhere to the introduction of Christianity, as now intolerantly preached, obstacles of the most serious kind. Attacks upon it must seem, to those whose lives are directed by it, the greatest of outrages and the most unpardonable of crimes. A religion for which every member of a community believes it his duty to die at call, is a religion for which he will fight. His patience with attacks upon it will depend upon the degree of his intelligence and the nature of his training. All the races of the Far East have not the intelligence of the Japanese, nor have they been equally well trained, under ages of military discipline, to adapt their conduct to circumstances. For [474] the Chinese peasant, in especial, attacks upon his religion are intolerable. His cult remains the most precious of his possessions, and his supreme guide in all matters of social right and wrong. The East has been tolerant of all creeds which do not assault the foundations of its societies; and if Western missions had been wise enough to leave those foundations alone,--to deal with the ancestor-cult as Buddhism did, and to show the same spirit of tolerance in other directions,--the introduction of Christianity upon a very extensive scale should have proved a matter of no difficulty. That the result would have been a Christianity differing considerably from Western Christianity is obvious,--the structure of Far-Eastern society not admitting of sudden transformations;--but the essentials of doctrine might have been widely propagated, without exciting social antagonism, much less race-hatred. To-day it is probably impossible to undo what the sterile labour of intolerance has already done. The hatred of Western religion in China and adjacent countries is undoubtedly due to the needless and implacable attacks which have been made upon the ancestor-cult. To demand of a Chinese or an Annamese that he cast away or destroy his ancestral tablets is not less irrational and inhuman than it would be to demand of an Englishman or a Frenchman that he destroy his mother's tombstone in proof of his devotion to Christianity. [475] Nay, it is much more inhuman,--for the European attaches to the funeral monument no such idea of sacredness as that which attaches, in Eastern belief, to the simple tablet inscribed with the name of the dead parent. From old time these attacks upon the domestic faith of docile and peaceful communities have provoked massacres; and, if persisted in, they will continue to provoke massacres while the people have strength left to strike. How foreign religious aggression is answered by native religious aggression; and how Christian military power avenges the foreign victims with tenfold slaughter and strong robbery, need not here be recorded. It has not been in these years only that