From the INTRODUCTION.
"The Chinese," Mr. Fairbairn writes, "may be selected as a contrast to the Hebrew and the Teuton: They are a people singularly deficient in the religious faculty. They are a gifted race, ingenious, inventive yet imitative, patient, industrious, frugal. Their civilization is ancient, their literary capacity considerable, their classics receive an almost religious reverence. But this people has a so attenuated religious faculty or genius, that it can hardly be said ever to have known religion (!), at least as Semitic and Indo-European peoples understand it. Their notions of deity are so formless and fluid that it can be argued, just as one interprets their speech, either that they are theists or atheists.
"They reverence humanity as typified, not in the endless promise and hope of the future, but in the completed characters and achievements of the past. Their piety is filial, their worship ancestral. There are, indeed, three established religions, but, not to speak of an advice to have nothing to do with any one of them given by a late emperor to his people, two would hardly be classed as such in any other country than China, while the third is a religion imported from India, and so depraved by the change that the Buddhism of the civilized Chinese stands beneath that of Tartary and Thibet."
This one quotation, taken from the recent work of an accomplished and erudite author, may suffice for many of a similar character. Most of the writers on China state that the Chinese are not a religious people, that they are indifferent to all religious creeds. Such vague assertions are commonly far from the truth. I, from my own observations, feel inclined to maintain that the Chinese belong perhaps to the most religious people (Acts xvii., 22, original) of the world. Only we must not look for any symptoms of religion similar to those to which we are accustomed in Christian lands. There are however, comparatively, more temples and altars, more idols and more religious practices in China than in almost all other countries. The whole public and private life is impregnated by religious observations; we see every important action of the government, as well as almost every movement in private life, inaugurated by different religious rites.
It is my purpose to investigate scientifically the Chinese religion. Such an undertaking is different from a description of the religions practices of the present time.
Religion has in China, as everywhere, its history. We shall have to trace, as far as possible, every religious practice to its origin, show the connexion between the present and the past, and explain, as far as possible, the symbolical forms from their original ideas which they too often have only preserved in a petrified state. 1, as a missionary, want to understand the religious state and condition of the people I have to deal with, just as a physician must know the nature of a disease, its origin and development, in order to bring the organism again to the wished-for state of health. The task is not an easy one.