Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/334

322 CHRISTIANITY IN CHINA, ETC. to their conquest, and quietly devoted themselves to commerce and industry, arts and letters. The religious sentiment was the only one that could have combined elements so discordant, and upon this point the Chinese and Mongols seemed to differ irrecon- cileably. When Kublai-Khan had achieved the conquest of China, he found three religious systems acclimated in it, and at that time engaged in bitter hostilities against one another ; though since then, having all fallen into the abyss of scepticism, they have become reconciled, and given each other the kiss of peace. The first and most ancient of these faiths is that called Jou-Khiao, the Doctrine of the Lettered, of which Con- fucius is regarded as the reformer and patriarch. It is based upon a philosophical pantheism, which has been variously interpreted at various epochs. It is believed that at a remote period, the existence of an omnipotent God, a requiter of human actions, was not excluded from it, and various passages from Confucius give room to suppose, that the sage himself held such a doctrine ; but the little care he took to inculcate it on his disciples, the vague meaning of the expressions he employed, and the resolution he had apparently taken to found his system of morals and justice merely upon the principles of love of order, and of a certain not very well defined " conformity with the designs of Heaven," and the pro- gress of nature, have allowed the philosophers who have succeeded him to go entirely astray, and many of them had, even in the thirteenth century, fallen into a true Spinozisin ; and while still appealing to the authority of their master, taught a materialist doctrine that has since degenerated into atheism. Confucius, himself, is never religious in his writings ;