udying in the original the canonical works of Confucius and their
commentaries, who could consult the greatest theologians then living,
and converse with the crowds that thronged the temples of the capital,
differed diametrically in their opinions as to the most vital points
in the state religion of China. Lecomte, Fouquet, Premare, and Bouvet
thought it undeniable that Confucius, his predecessors and his
disciples, had entertained the noblest ideas on the constitution of
the universe, and had sacrificed to the true God in the most ancient
temple of the earth. According to Maigrot, Navarette, on the contrary,
and even according to the Jesuit Longobardi, the adoration of the
Chinese was addressed to inanimate tablets, meaningless inscriptions,
or, in the best case, to coarse ancestral spirits and beings without
intelligence.[2] If we believe the former, the ancient deism of China
approached the purity of the Christian religion; if we listen to the
latter, the absurd fetichism of the multitude degenerated amongst the
educated, into systematic materialism and atheism. In answer to the
peremptory texts quoted by one party, the other adduced the glosses of
accredited interpreters, and the dispute of the missionaries who had
lived in China and knew Chinese, had to be settled in the last
instance by a decision of the see of Rome.

[Footnote 2: Abel Remusat, 'Melanges,' p. 162.]

There is hardly any religion that has been studied in its sacred
literature, and watched in its external worship with greater care
than the modern religion of the Hindus, and yet it would be extremely
hard to give a faithful and intelligible description of it. Most
people who have lived in India would maintain that the Indian
religion, as believed in and practised at present by the mass of the
people, is idol worship and nothing else. But let us hear one of the
mass of the people, a Hindu of Benares, who in a lecture delivered
before an English and native audience defends his faith and the faith
of his forefathers against such sweeping accusations. 'If by
idolatry,' he says, "is meant a system of worship which confines our
ideas of the Deity to a mere image of clay or stone, which prevents
our hearts from being expanded and elevated with lofty notions of the
attributes of God, if this is what is meant by idolatry, we disclaim
idolatry, we abhor idolatry, and deplore the ignorance or
uncharitableness of those that charge us with this grovelling system