Evidently the good Doctor could not withstand the temptation to administer a sharp Protestant pin-prick to his Romanist rivals, though "it is not easy to perceive" why he should find fault with the Papists in this respect when missionaries of his own branch of Christianity were (as some still are) equally ready to attempt the cheerless task of reconciling contradictories. They condemn the Chinese for their demonology and superstitious follies, yet many of them are merely substituting Western superstition for Eastern. They expel demons from the bodies of sick men, they report in their journals the occurrence of miracles wrought by the Deity on behalf of their propaganda, they pray for the supersession of the laws of meteorology, they report cases of real devils actually speaking through "idols," they believe in the existence of real witches, and they still teach the "heathen" fabulous stories of the creation of the world and the origin of man.[315] That missionaries of this class are less numerous than formerly is fortunately true, but their teachings presumably remain the treasured possession of their converts, and if those converts or their descendants ever break out in acts of fanatical bigotry and intolerance, or take to enforcing their beliefs on others, the responsibility will rest with the Mission Boards for sending out Christian teachers whose religious beliefs were of a type that flourished widely in our own land in the age of witch-burning and about the time of Mr. Praise-God Barebones, but which, thanks chiefly to Biblical criticism and the study of comparative mythology and the advance of scientific knowledge, has happily become all but extinct among our educated classes. But to return to the specific charge brought against Romanists by Dr. Wells Williams--that the Pope and the Dominicans condemned ancestor-worship as idolatrous although they conducted much the same services themselves before the images of the _Mater Dei_ and other deified mortals--this charge is one that has never yet been rebutted in a manner satisfactory to those who are not Romanists.