Yet it must not be supposed that there is no such thing as Confucianism in China outside the ranks of the official classes. Confucian ideals of life and conduct, Confucian doctrines of the relations between rulers and ruled, Confucian views of the reciprocal rights and duties of parents and children, friends, neighbours, strangers, the Confucian sanction of the cult of Ancestors, these are all strong living forces in the China of to-day. "Wherever Chinamen go," says Dr. H. A. Giles, "they carry with them in their hearts the two leading features of Confucianism, the patriarchal system and ancestral worship."[252] The influx of new light from the West is doubtless bringing about a change in the traditional attitude of the Chinese towards the person of the teacher whom their forefathers have revered for more than two thousand years; but though the Confucian cult conceivably at some future time may be formally disestablished and the Confucian temples turned into technical colleges, it is to be hoped for the sake of China that many centuries will elapse before Confucianism as a moral force, as a guide of life, fades away from the hearts and minds of the people. Confucianism is not a mere code of rules that can be established or abrogated as the fancy takes any prominent statesman who happens to have the ear of the throne; it has intertwined itself with the very roots of the tree of Chinese life, and if that venerable tree, in spite of a mutilated branch or two, is still very far from hopeless decay it is to Confucianism that much of its strength and vigour is due.[253] Perhaps no teacher of antiquity has suffered more disastrously at the hands of most of his interpreters and translators than has Confucius. Even his Chinese commentators have not always been successful; it is then little to be wondered at that European students, often lacking both a complete equipment of Chinese scholarship and a power of sympathetic insight into alien modes of thought, and above all possessed by an intensely strong bias against "heathendom" and "heathen" thinkers, have failed again and again to give their fellow-countrymen an adequate account either of the Confucian system as a whole or of the personal character of the Master himself. Confucius, as one of his most recent English translators reminds us, was one of the most open-minded of men, and approached no subject with "foregone conclusions"; but the whole attitude of the Englishman who is still regarded as the great expounder of Confucianism to the English-speaking world (Dr. Legge) "bespoke one comprehensive and fatal foregone conclusion--the conviction that it must at every point prove inferior to Christianity."[254] Now what is the impression that Confucianism gives to a European student who is not only a good Chinese scholar and therefore able to dispense with translations, but is also entirely free from religious prejudice?