Page:Christianity in China, Tartary, and Thibet Volume I.djvu/81

OBJECTIONS OF VOLTAIRE AND MILNE. G9 Voltaire, in fact, had determined to make it out that the inscription of Si-ngan-Fou was nothing but a " pious fraud " of the Jesuits to deceive the Chinese, and per- suade them that Christianity had been already received by their ancestors ; and the philosophical party in France, out of love for Voltaire, and hatred of the Jesuits, also contested the authenticity of the inscription. Now, however, this question is definitively settled, for men of profound erudition and perfect candour have decided in its favour, and Abel Iiemusat has argued against the objections raised by Voltaire and some Protestant writers, more especially those of a Mr. Milne, the founder of a Mission at Malacca, who, in a paper pub- lished in 1820, endeavoured to insinuate doubts as to the genuineness of the monument in question. " Two remarks," says Mr. Milne, " occur to me in relation to the historians of China; the first, that no authentic Chinese report that I have ever seen makes the least mention of this sect, and that, with the exception of the stone of Si-ngan-Fou, of which some missionaries from Koine have spoken, I have never seen or heard that Chinese writers are aware of the existence of any monu- ment, any inscription, or of the remains of any ancient Church ; the second is, that no part of the Nestorian doctrines or ceremonies is found mingled with the pagan systems of China, at least as far as I have been able to discover." There is no need of any long discussion to show that these two remarks, and the inference that might be drawn from them, are equally without foundation. There would, in the first place, be nothing very sur- prising in the fact, that two religious sects, foreign to one another in their language, origin, and in the nature f 3