What the Emperor can do on a large scale every head of a Chinese family does regularly on a small one. In a sense no ceremony is necessary: a man becomes an ancestral spirit as soon as he dies, irrespective of anything that his son may do for him. But his position as a _shên_ is hardly a regular one--he is a mere "homeless ghost"--until the son has carried out the traditional rites. The _shên chu_[318]--the "spirit-tablet"--becomes the dead man's representative; no longer visible and audible, he is believed to be still carrying on his existence on a non-material plane, and to be still capable, in some mysterious way which the Chinese themselves do not pretend to understand, of protecting and watching over the living members of the family and of bringing prosperity and happiness to future generations. The filial affection of son for father is deepened on the father's death into permanent religious reverence, and this reverential feeling finds its natural expression in a system of rites and ceremonies which, for the want of a better term, we call ancestor-worship. The "idolatry" consists in bowing with clasped hands towards the tombs or spirit-tablets, placing before them little cups and dishes containing wine and food, and burning incense in front of the family portraits in the ancestral temple at the season of New Year, or (if there are no portraits) before a scroll containing the family pedigree. If the disembodied members of a family were "gods" in the sense usually attributed to the word their spiritual powers would not be confined--as they normally are--to the affairs of their own descendants. The orthodox Chinese knows that it is not only useless but wrong to "worship"[319] the spirits of any family but his own. "For a man to sacrifice to a spirit which does not belong to him," said Confucius, "is flattery."[320] For the sake of brevity and convenience we may and sometimes do speak of the private ancestral spirits and of the great national divinities as "gods," but we should preserve the necessary distinctions of meaning in our own minds. That it is only a rough-and-ready mode of speech may easily be perceived when we attempt to make a single Chinese term apply to both these classes of spiritual beings. It is true enough that both (in most cases) sprang from the same human origin, so that their powers and functions differ, as already pointed out, in degree rather than in kind; but if--whether from ignorance or from a desire to be exceptionally polite--we were to describe a man's deceased forefathers as _Ti_ (the nearest equivalent to "God" that the Chinese language possesses) we should probably be the innocent cause of an outburst of genial mirth. The average Chinese takes a very much humbler view of the degree of deification that has fallen to his dead father's lot than would be implied by the use of so distinguished a title.