various productions, or in the history and practice of medicine.

Many men among the gentry are devoted to letters, in order to qualify themselves for the offices of the magistracy; and such learning as government has deemed proper for that end is also encouraged and rewarded. The conduct of these magistrates accords with laws which are published among the people. Every poor man's house is his castle, which no inferior officer can legally enter without a special warrant from the governor of a province. Throughout the whole of that vast empire there is a system of social order and regularity, either sanctioned by law or by established usage. Still, the people are given up to the most degrading and abominable idolatries and vices. Not liking to retain God in their knowledge, they worship and serve the creature rather than the Creator; they are haters of the true God, and are filled with all unrighteousness, fornication, and wickedness. Envy and malice, deceit and falsehood, pride and boasting, prevail to a boundless extent; while these evil principles, with a selfish, ungenerous, scarcely honest prudence, and a cold metaphysical inhumanity, are the general characteristics of the natives of China. The latter part of this accusation is proved by their backwardness to assist persons in imminent danger of losing their lives by drowning or otherwise, the cruel treatment of domestic slaves and concubines, the tortures both of men and women in public courts, and the murder of female infants, which is connived at, though contrary to law. The philosophy of their ancient sage, Confucius, acknowledges no future state of existence, and includes no reference to the duties

of man to his Maker. It presents nothing beyond the grave to the fears or hopes of the mind, but the praise or censure of posterity. Present expediency is the chief motive of action. Of the great and glorious God it makes no mention, nor does it rise above an obscure recognition of some principle of order in nature, which, when violated, induces present evil. Heaven and earth, it is said, assumed by some innate power, their present order, and a supposed two-fold energy co-operated in the formation of creatures and of gods. Heaven is now considered the first power in nature, and this clod of earth on which we tread the second; and to each are the gods pronounced subordinate. Sometimes, indeed, these deities are excluded, as their existence is supposed by some to be uncertain, and then heaven, earth, and man, are the three great powers. Two other systems are found in China, which make much more use of the gods than that of Confucius: these acknowledge a future state of rewards, enjoin fastings, prayers, penances, and masses for the dead, and threaten the wicked with various punishments, in different hells, in a separate state; or with poverty, disease, or a brute nature, when they shall be born again into this world.

The doctrines of Laon-Keun make the incomprehensible Taou, the eternal Reason or Logos, the supreme principle; and some Europeans suppose that when he says, "One produced a second, two produced a third, and three produced all things," he refers to opinions he had heard concerning the triune God of the sacred Scriptures. His followers represent him as having often been incarnate, as a teacher of mankind. They inculcate austerities

and abstractions, for the purpose of attenuating the grosser part of human nature, and gradually rising to a sublime, spiritual, and divine state; and they have in different ages devoted themselves to the visionary pursuits of alchemy, and an attempt to exist without food or respiration, from an idea that the breath could circulate round the system as the blood does, and so respiration would be unnecessary, and man immortal.

These people, as well as the third class of religionists in China, the Foo-too, or Budha sect, which was, at the close of the first century, brought from India to China, believe in the transmigration of souls. Both have priests and priestesses, who live like the monks and nuns of Europe; and who are licensed by the state, though none receive any emoluments from it. The sect of the learned, who profess to be followers of Confucius, and who fill the offices of government, employ no priests. Fathers, magistrates, and princes, render homage and do sacrifice in their own proper persons, to the household gods, the district gods, the spirits of rivers and of hills, and the gods of the fire, and the winds, the rain, the thunder, and the earth, and the heavens, and the polar star. They worship, too, the image of Confucius, who never professed to be more than a man, who even declined the title of sage, and who did not teach the separate existence of the human soul, which doctrine, indeed, his disciples deny. These persons often laugh at the religionists of their own country, yet still observe the rites and superstitions, and worship the idols of the other sects, as well as their own. governors of provinces and local magistrates often visit the Budha temples, and fall prostrate before

The

the cross-legged image of woolly-headed Budha, and subscribe largely for the support of the priests, the repair of the temples, the making of new gods, and the cleaning and ornamenting of old ones. So far, indeed, does idolatry go, that his Tartar majesty of China frequently confers new titles and honours on the gods of the land.

The priests give the people no instruction, either in the principles of morality, or in the rites of their religion and there is no social worship, nor any day of rest, on which to assemble at the temples. Some regard is paid to the new and full moon, after the manner of the Jews; but in China there is no sabbath. The priests, in companies, worship the idols morning and evening, recite prayers to them, chant incantations, light up candles, and burn incense. They are also employed to offer prayers for the sick, and say masses for the dead; and some, belonging to the sect of Laou-Keun, attend funerals. In families, in shops, and in boats, where people live, any person that may have leisure, lights the matches of incense morning and evening, and places them before the idol, after having made three bows; having the matches ignited in their hands, joined, and held up before the face. Women are discouraged from going to the temples, and are told to worship their parents at home, for they are the best gods. When any one is sick, and death is apprehended, persons are deputed to visit the various idol temples to intercede with all the gods and goddesses for them; and sometimes, on recovery, men devote their children to the service of the gods, and consequently to perpetual celibacy. Others dedicate to the Budha temples a fish, a fowl, or a swine, affording it the

means of sustenance till it dies a natural death; it being thought highly meritorious not to destroy animal life.

The Elysium of the West, which the followers of Foo look for, is such as the deluded imagination of an Asiatic would naturally paint. Fortified palaces; groves of trees producing gems; pools of fragrant water, yielding the lotus flower as large as the wheel of a cart; showers of sweet odours, falling on a land, the dust of which is yellow gold; myriads of birds, of the most exquisite plumage, singing on trees of gold, with the most harmonious and ravishing notes, of a hundred thousand kinds, &c. &c. Such is their paradise; but, in conformity with the comparative contempt in which the female character is held throughout the east, they exclude all women, as such, from a participation therein. Those females who have acted well on earth, are first transformed into men, and then admitted into that palace of delights.

The sufferings of the Tartarus, which their terrified imaginations have figured, are represented in pictures, as the punishments in purgatory and Tartarus were exhibited in the Eleusinian and other heathen mysteries: with this difference, however, that these are exposed to public view; those were seen by the initiated only. Lakes of blood, into which women who die in child-bed are plunged; red hot iron pillars, which the wicked are caused to embrace; devouring lions, tigers, snakes, &c.; mountains stuck all over with knives, on the points of which the condemned are cast down, and seen weltering in gore; cutting out the tongue, strangling, sawing asunder between flaming iron posts; the condemned creeping into the skins