=Religion.= "In considering all systems of idolatry and superstition, one significant fact stands prominent, _the utter neglect of religious training of the young_. China's three great religions have nothing answering to the Christian Sunday School. Of course, boys and girls pick up some religious ideas in their intercourse with those about them. But nobody ever deliberately sits down to tell them of this god and that god, their origin, character and power. Only incidentally is such knowledge conveyed. There are many religious books; but from the difficulty of learning to read, they are necessarily sealed to the young mind. If the young are told to worship this idol and that idol, they never understand why and wherefore they should do this. In time they comprehend that they do it to obtain favor and to gain merit. "I well remember the first time I was led to a temple and there told to bend my knees to the idol decked out in a gorgeous robe, its face blackened by the smoke from the incense. On either side of the room stood four huge idols, with stern and forbidding faces. One of them was especially frightful. It was the God of Thunder represented by an image having the body of a man and the head of a highly caricatured rooster. This idol had a hammer in one hand and a large nail in the other, with which he is supposed to strike wicked persons. This god made such an impression on me that I had a horrible dream about it that very night. I saw him clad in fierceness; he moved his hands threateningly. Almost choked with fright though I was, I managed to cry out and that awoke me."[96] =Education.= Education in China is of long standing. The Chinese from the earliest time, 2,000 B. C., or even earlier, held school education of high value. The competitive literary examinations of candidates for office was established about a thousand years later and about 700 A. D. the whole plan was gone over and arranged as found in the last century, previous to the changes of recent years. No other nation has so venerated scholars and scholarship. Nevertheless of this high esteem for education, there were no public schools in the sense as with us as the government did not establish schools, except, perhaps, for the most advanced students. Yet there were a great number of schools, taken care of in a private way, and although every village did not have a school, yet they would have liked such, but mostly on account of poverty could not, for everywhere was the most profound reverence for education. There were three classes of undergraduate schools: "The primary, in which little is attended to beyond memoriter recitation and imitative chirography; the middle, in which the canonical books are expounded; and the classical, in which composition is the leading exercise."[97] Because of the great number of literary scholars who wanted to teach, the pay for the most part was quite meager.