If in Weihaiwei as elsewhere in rural China the influence of Confucius is to be traced not in temples and religious or commemorative ceremonial but in the customs, manners and character of the people, it is clear that a description of the Confucianism of this corner of the Empire would involve a repetition of much that has been already set forth at length in the course of the foregoing pages. But there is a feature of Confucianism that so far has been treated less thoroughly than it deserves, although it constitutes by far the most important element in the religious life of the people. This is the cult of Ancestors. There is perhaps a popular tendency in Europe (notwithstanding the doctrines of Herbert Spencer) to regard this cult as something peculiar to the Far East and without parallel in Western modes of religious thought and practice: but, as students of comparative religion well know, such is not the case. That ancestor-worship or something very like it existed among the ancient Egyptians might be assumed from the extraordinary measures which they took to preserve the bodies of the dead: but we know from other evidence that the ancestral Ghost was regularly approached with veneration and sacrifices. Cakes and other articles were offered to the Egyptian _ka_ just as they are offered to the spirits of the dead in China to-day; and, as in China, the sacrificial ceremonies were made the occasion of family gatherings and genial festivities.[280] Great religious revolutions have taken place in Egypt in the course of ages, but among the Egyptian Mohammedans and the Copts traces of ancestor-worship exist to this day. The evidence at present available hardly justifies us in declaring that this cult was also practised in Babylonia, though it seems at least certain that heroes and distinguished men were deified and venerated. There is less doubt about the early Israelites. "It is impossible to avoid the conclusion," says the Rev. A. W. Oxford,[281] "that the pre-Jehovistic worship was that of ancestors." He observes that "the importance attached to a father's blessing before his death and the great fear caused by a curse (Judges xvii. 2) were relics of the old cult of ancestors." The importance of the same cult in Greece and Rome can hardly be exaggerated. In Greece, Zeus himself was regarded in one of his aspects as πατρῷος, the ancestral god. "The central point of old Roman religion," as Grant Allen has said,[282] "was clearly the household; the family ghosts or _lares_ were the most honoured gods." In various parts of the "Dark Continent" ancestor-worship is the prevailing religion. "Nowhere," says Max Müller, "is a belief and a worship of ancestral spirits so widely spread as in Africa."[283] That it existed and still exists in many Eastern countries besides China need hardly be emphasised. It is deeply embedded in Hinduism, and in Japan it has grafted itself on Shinto.[284]