If China thinks, or Europe persuades her into the belief, that her backward position among the great Powers of the world is due to Confucianism, she will be doing a great wrong to the memory of one of her greatest sons and a greater wrong to herself.[262] It would be just as reasonable to make the Founder of Christianity, one of the most gracious and most pitiful of men, responsible for the injustice and cruelty of the Crusades or for the frightful atrocities practised in Europe on the bodies of heretics, or for such priestly and monkish abuses as the sale of "pardons" and the traffic in saintly relics and fragments of the "True Cross"; indeed it would perhaps be rather more reasonable, for the mediæval popes and monks at least professed to act in the name of their Lord, whereas it is not in the name of Confucius that offices in China are bought and sold or that Chinese magistrates take bribes and "squeezes," or that the naval and military defences of the country have been allowed to fall into decay. Does any one in Europe now suppose that if Christ had returned to earth in the Middle Ages He would have accepted a seat beside the Grand Inquisitors and joined them in sentencing innocent men and women "to the thumbscrew and the stake, for the glory of the Lord"? Or that if He had appeared in England in 1646 He would have supported the Act which made it a capital offence to deny the truth of any of the dogmas that the English Church of that period chose to consider essential? This is how a papal legate in 1209 wrote to Innocent III. after a victorious crusade against the Albigenses: "Our troops, sparing neither sex nor age, put to the sword nearly twenty thousand; splendid deeds were accomplished in the overthrow of the enemy, the whole city was sacked and burned by a divine revenge marvellous fierce." A pope may have taken this doughty champion of the Church to his bosom, but is it conceivable that the Carpenter of Nazareth would have greeted this monster, whose sword was reeking with human blood, with the welcoming words, "Well done, thou good and faithful servant"? If we refuse, as we well may, to lay on Jesus the least tittle of responsibility for the terrible crimes perpetrated in Europe for many consecutive centuries in the name of the Christian religion, would it not be becoming on our part to hesitate before we ascribe the faults and disasters of the Chinese people and their Government wholly or even partially to their faith in the teachings of Confucius?