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LECTURE III.
143 almost, and in Chinal altogether, into temples where the spirits of the departed were actually worshipped. All this takes place by slow degrees; it begins with placing a flower on the tomb; it ends with worshipping the spirits of departed emperors? as equals of the Supreme Spirit, the Shang-te or Tien, and as enjoying a divine rank far above other spirits or Shin.
The difference, at first sight, between the minute ceremonial of China and the homely worship of Finns and Lapps may seem enormous; but if we trace both back as far as we can, we see that the early stages of their religious belief are curiously alike. First, a worship of heaven, as the emblem of the most exalted conception which the untutored mind of man can entertain, expanding with the expanding thoughts of its worshippers, and eventually leading and lifting the soul from horizon to horizon to a belief in that which is beyond all horizons, a belief in that which is infinite. Secondly, a belief in deathless spirits or powers of nature; which supplies the more immediate and every-day wants of the religious instinct of man, satisfies the imagination, and furnishes the earliest poetry with elevated themes. Lastly, a belief in the existence of ancestral spirits : which implies, consciously or unconsciously, in a spiritual or in a material form, that which is one of the life-springs of all religion, a belief in immortality.
Allow me in conclusion to recapitulate shortly the results of this Lecture.
1 When an emperor died, and men erected an ancestral temple, and set up a parental tablet (as a resting place for the shin' or spirit of the departed), they called him Te.-Medhurst, 'Inquiry,' p. 7; from the Le-ke, vol. i. p. 49. 2 Medhurst, Inquiry,' p. 45.
