A year ago, while travelling in the province of Anhui, I visited a town which had so far abandoned its "heathen" rites that a long row of images had been dragged from their roadside shrines and tossed into the river. Yet I was told by resident European missionaries that their converts had had nothing whatever, directly or indirectly, to do with this proceeding; it had been carried out solely by the young local _literati_, who had shown themselves as absolutely impervious to the Christian propaganda as they were contemptuous of the puerile superstitions of the masses. But it will be a long time yet before the essential rites and observances connected with the cult of ancestors begin to suffer from the inroads either of Rationalism or of Christianity. Buddhism and Taoism are China's privileged guests, who--unless they speedily adapt themselves to new conditions--may shortly find they have outstayed their welcome; but the cult of ancestors is enthroned in the hearts of the people, and if Christianity is ever to dislodge it, or even find a place by its side, the intruder will be obliged to adopt a less arrogant and less uncompromising attitude than it has assumed hitherto. Dr. A. H. Smith, Dr. Edkins,[310] and other missionaries declare that China must choose between Christianity and ancestor-worship. She made up her mind on the subject in the middle of the eighteenth century, as a result of the controversy between the Jesuits and the Vatican,[311] and there is no indication that she regrets her choice. It will be remembered that in the controversy alluded to, the Jesuit missionaries, who had hitherto been amazingly successful in their propaganda, strongly advocated the toleration of ancestor-worship on the ground that the rites were merely civil and commemorative, and were not idolatrous. This view, after lengthy disputes, was finally condemned as erroneous, and the cult of ancestors on the part of Christians was prohibited by the Roman pontiff (Benedict XIV.) "without qualification or concession of any kind."[312] The result of this was the collapse of the young and vigorous Roman Church in China. The Chinese Emperor, who had found himself contradicted on Chinese soil by papal edicts, was naturally disinclined to treat the foreign religion and its professors with the tolerance and respect that had hitherto been extended to it.[313] It is interesting to note the Protestant attitude towards the papal decision on this matter. "It is not easy to perceive, perhaps," writes Dr. Wells Williams, "why the Pope and the Dominicans were so much opposed to the worship of ancestral penates among the Chinese when they performed much the same services themselves before the images of Mary, Joseph, Cecilia, Ignatius, and hundreds of other deified mortals."[314]