Buddhist or Taouist monastery a similar tablet is placed upon the high altar. The emperor is evidently determined that the people shall learn that to him, the son of heaven, as well as to the gods, allegiance and homage are due. To each of the principal mosques a school is attached, in which the children are taught to read the Koran in the original tongue. CHAPTER V. POPULAR GODS AND GODDESSES. ANY exposition of the religious systems of the Chinese which did not give some account of the gods and goddesses whom the people delight to honour, would be extremely incomplete. If the Chinese do not trouble themselves much about religious doctrines, they are very much interested in the canonized mortals and imaginary beings whom they suppose to dispense the blessings and the ills of life. Their religion is essentially a cultus. The worshipper who kneels at the shrine of Confucius will also worship the Taouistical Pak-te; and, on special occasions, Taouist and Buddhist priests may be seen praying in the same national temple. "Like master, like man," is a proverb which is capable of being applied to a nation and its gods, and this chapter about the gods and goddesses of the Chinese may help the reader to understand the people. In China the military and the learned classes divide between them the honours and emoluments of the state, and Kwan-te, the god of war, and Man-chang, the god of learning, have their votaries everywhere. Kwan-te, a distinguished general in the third year of the Christian era, was not canonized until nearly eight hundred years after his death. Now he has a state temple in every provincial, prefectoral, and district city of the empire; and, morning and evening, in almost every house, adoration is paid before the representation of him which stands on the ancestral altar. He is regarded as the protector of the peace of the empire, and of its multitudinous families. The immediate occasion of his being canonized is said to have been the drying up of the large and númerous salt-wells in the province of Shansi. This calamity was a cause of great perplexity and distress. The ministers of the Emperor Chin-tsung, like the magicians whom Pharaoh summoned to read his dreams, were helpless, and in his perplexity Chin-tsung turned to the ArchAbbot of the Taouists, who declared that the wells had been dried up by an evil spirit. An appeal must therefore be måde to Kwan-te, who now reigned as a king in the world of spirits. The emperor straightway wrote a despatch to Kwan-te on the subject of his conversation with the Arch-Abbot, and the Imperial communication was conveyed to the departed warrior in the flames of a sacred fire. An hour had scarcely elapsed, when Kwan-te appeared in mid-heaven riding on his red-coloured charger. The god declared that until a temple had been erected in his honour, the petition of the emperor could not be attended to. A temple was accordingly erected with much haste, and so soon as the top-stone had been placed, the salt wells again yielded their supplies. It is said that Kwan-te appeared in 1855 to the generalissimo of the Imperial forces, whom he enabled to defeat the rebels near Nankin. For this interposition, the Emperor Hien-fung placed him on a footing with Confucius, who had been regarded till then as the principal deity in the national Pantheon. In the porch of the state temple of Kwan-te, at Canton-one of the finest temples in the city-is a figure of the red horse of the god, beside which stands the figure of a stalwart armour-bearer, as if waiting to receive the commands of his master. Even armour-bearer and horse have their votaries; and in the large town of Cum-lee-hoi in the silk districts of Kwang-tung, I saw women worshipping these images, and binding small bags or purses to the bridle rein of the charger. Man-chang is especially worshipped by collegians and schoolboys. He is supposed to record their names in a book of remembrance, and to inscribe opposite each name the character of the individual. In front of his idols there is generally an angel bearing this book of remembrance in his hand. He was famous for his great literary attainments, and his love of virtue. It is |