hods of my own to arrive at a satisfactory
conclusion;--without reaching a result which I can venture to lay before
the public. My impression has been that four hundred millions is hardly
an exaggeration.

But supposing that we had reliable returns of the whole population, how
shall we proceed to apportion that among Confucianists, Taoists, and
Buddhists? Confucianism is the orthodoxy of China. The common name for
it is Ju Chiao, "the Doctrines held by the Learned Class," entrance into
the circle of which is, with a few insignificant exceptions, open to all
the people. The mass of them and the masses under their influence are
preponderatingly Confucian; and in the observance of ancestral worship,
the most remarkable feature of the religion proper of China from the
earliest times, of which Confucius was not the author but the prophet,
an overwhelming majority are regular and assiduous.

Among "the strange principles" which the emperor of the K'ang-hsi
period, in one of his famous Sixteen Precepts, exhorted his people to
"discountenance and put away, in order to exalt the correct doctrine,"
Buddhism and Taoism were both included. If, as stated in the note quoted
from Professor Mueller, the emperor countenances both the Taoist worship
and the Buddhist, he does so for reasons of state; to please especially
his Buddhistic subjects in Thibet and Mongolia, and not to offend the
many whose superstitious fancies incline to Taoism.

When I went out and in as a missionary among the Chinese people for
about thirty years, it sometimes occurred to me that only the inmates of
their monasteries and the recluses of both systems should be enumerated
as Buddhists and Taoists; but I was in the end constrained to widen that
judgment, and to admit a considerable following of both among the
people, who have neither received the tonsure nor assumed the yellow
top. Dr. Eitel, in concluding his discussion of this point in his
"Lecture on Buddhism, an Event in History," says: "It is not too much to
say that most Chinese are theoretically Confucianists, but emotionally
Buddhists or Taoists. But fairness requires us to add that, though the
mass of the people are more or less influenced by Buddhist doctrines,
yet the people, as a whole, have no respect for the Buddhist church, and
habitually sneer at Buddhist priests." For the "most" in the former of
these two sentences I would substitute "nearly all;" and between my
friend's "but" and "emotionall