It is very difficult, then, to know without precise definition what is the exact meaning of those who declare that the Chinese make gods of their dead fathers. Du Bose has condemned the Chinese ancestral cult because it inculcates the worship of "parents once human but now divine," and he quotes with apparent approval the words of another writer who describes it as "one of the subtlest phases of idolatry--essentially evil with the guise of goodness--ever established among men."[304] Wells Williams says that Chinese ancestor-worship is distinctly idolatrous; yet he admits that the rites consist "merely of pouring out libations and burning paper and candles at the grave, and then a family meeting at a social feast, with a few simple prostrations and petitions ... all is pleasant, decorous, and harmonious ... and the family meeting on this occasion is looked forward to by all with much the same feeling that Christmas is in Old England or Thanksgiving in New England."[305] So says the earnest American missionary; and those of us who not only see nothing wrong in the Chinese ancestral ceremonies but would be exceedingly sorry to see them abolished, will perhaps feel inclined to smile at the reproachful terms in which he refers to Sir John Davis, who had expressed the heterodox opinion that the rites were "harmless, if not meritorious, forms of respect for the dead." Another American writer, well known as an authority on China, is equally strongly opposed to any compromise with the cult of ancestors. "It makes dead men into gods, and its only gods are dead men. Its love, its gratitude, and its fears are for earthly parents only. It has no conception of a Heavenly Father, and feels no interest in such a being when He is made known. Either Christianity will never be introduced into China or ancestral worship will be given up, for they are contradictories. In the death struggle between them the fittest only will survive."[306] To show that this is not quite the view taken by all American missionaries, let us quote the words of yet a third. Dr. W. A. P. Martin, whose _Lore of Cathay_ is one of the most interesting books of its kind on China yet produced, has a valuable chapter on ancestor-worship in which he takes a much more liberal view than that of his colleagues, though as a champion of Christianity he feels himself obliged to find fault with "the transformation of the deceased into tutelar divinities" and with "the invocation of departed spirits." He admits that the ceremonies connected with the cult are of an exceedingly impressive nature. "The spectacle of a great nation," he says, "with its whole population gathered round the altars of their ancestors, tracing their lineage up to the hundredth generation, and recognising the ties of kindred to the hundredth degree, is one that partakes of the sublime."[307]