It is perhaps of greater interest to Europeans to know that the cult of ancestors existed in pre-Christian days in the forests of old Germany. "Our early Teutonic forefathers," says Mr. F. York Powell, "worshipped the dead and treated their deceased ancestors as gods."[285] But old customs, especially religious ones, die hard; and so we need not be surprised to find that just as the Isis and Horus of the ancient Egyptians have become the Madonna and Child of the modern Italians,[286] so the ancestor-worship of our Teutonic forefathers has been transformed under Christian influences into solemn commemorations of the dead, and masses for the souls of the "faithful departed." The transformation, indeed, is in some places hardly complete to this day. "Although full ancestor-worship," says Dr. Tylor, "is not practised in modern Christendom, there remains even now within its limits a well-marked worship of the dead. A crowd of saints, who were once men and women, now form an order of inferior deities, active in the affairs of men, and receiving from them reverence and prayer, thus coming strictly under the definition of manes. This Christian cultus of the dead, belonging in principle to the older manes worship, was adapted to answer another purpose in the course of religious transition in Europe."[287] It appears that in one part of Christendom, at least, actual ancestor-worship is not yet extinct. In backward parts of Russia at this day, we are told, "the dead in return for the offerings are supplicated to guard and foster the family and crops. 'Ye spirits of the long departed, guard and preserve us well. Make none of us cripples. Send no plagues upon us. Cause the corn, the wine, and the food to prosper with us.'"[288] Evidently if ancestor-worship is idolatrous, Europe is not without its idolatry even in this twentieth century. The Ancestral cult, as every one knows, received the hall-mark of Confucius's approval, though Confucius himself did not profess to be a theologian or to speak with authority on matters spiritual. It is an extraordinary thing that Confucius's reticence with regard to these matters has been selected by Christian missionaries as a subject for special reproach. Prof. Legge, after quoting some of Confucius's utterances on the subject of the unseen world, asks why he did not "candidly tell his real thoughts on so interesting a subject,"[289] and exclaims "Surely this was not the teaching proper to a sage." Elsewhere he solves this question himself, for he decides that Confucius was no sage.[290] Unfortunately he does not define the word Sage, though he seems to imply that the word can be fittingly applied only to a Christian teacher. He did not perhaps quite appreciate the significance of the Horatian remark _Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona_.