If a Chinese goes to his _t'u ti_ (village "god") or to Kuan Yin or to the Queen of Heaven (_Shêng Mu T'ien Hou_) or to Lung Wang the ruler of clouds and water, with prayers for rain, or for the cure of disease, or for safety from shipwreck; or if he beseeches the spirits of his dead ancestors to protect the family and grant its members health and prosperity, his proceedings are immediately condemned as idolatrous. But if a Christian goes and prays to St. Hubert for an antidote to a mad dog's bite or to St. Apollonia for a toothache-cure, or to St. Theodorus at Rome for the life of a sick child, or to the Blessed John Berchmans for the eradication of cancer in the breast, or to Our Lady of Lourdes for the cure of a diseased bone, this is not idolatry but good Christianity! As a matter of fact the ancestral spirits of the Chinese and the great majority of the Taoist deities are neither more nor less "gods" than the saints of Christendom. They--like the saints--are regarded as the spirits of certain dead men who in their new life beyond the grave are supposed to have acquired more or less limited powers over some of the forces of nature and over certain of the threads of human destiny. One is just as much a "god" as the other. The Christian refuses to call his saints gods because that would be confessing to polytheism, and as he professes to be a monotheist that would never do; but he insists on accusing the Chinese of turning dead men into gods because he wants to prove that the Chinese are idolatrous and polytheistic. If he says that he goes by the verdict of the Chinese themselves, who apply to their dead men the title _shên_ and (in some cases) the higher title _ti_, it is fair to remind him that if he insists upon translating the former of these terms by the word "god" he should at the same time supply a clear definition of the precise meaning which that word is intended to convey; when he has done that it will be time enough for us to consider whether the word "god" gives a fair idea of the meaning of the Chinese when they declare that their deceased ancestors have become _shên_. As to the supposed functions of the Chinese "deities" and the Christian "saints," it would puzzle a keen dialectician to say how the miracle-working of the one essentially differs from that of the other, or how it is that St. Thomas of Canterbury, in spite of his wonder-working bones, is a mere saint, while Kuan Ti--who was once a stout soldier, but having been canonised by imperial decree is now famous throughout the Chinese Empire as the spiritual Patron of War--is to be hooted at as a false "god."[316]