After all, the most awful punishment inflicted in Purgatory upon sinners is one which, being purely mental, may not appeal so powerfully to the masses as the coarse tortures mentioned above. In the fifth Court, the souls of the wicked are taken to a terrace from which they can hear and see what goes on in their old homes after their own deaths. "They see their last wishes disregarded, and their instructions disobeyed. The property they scraped together with so much trouble is dissipated and gone. The husband thinks of taking another wife; the widow meditates second nuptials. Strangers are in possession of the old estate; there is nothing to divide amongst the children. Debts long since paid are brought again for settlement, and the survivors are called upon to acknowledge false claims upon the departed. Debts owed are lost for want of evidence, with endless recriminations, abuse, and general confusion, all of which falls upon the three families—father's, mother's, and wife's—connected with the deceased. These in their anger speak ill of him that is gone. He sees his children become corrupt, and friends fall away. Some, perhaps, may stroke the coffin and let fall a tear, departing quickly with a cold smile. Worse than that, the wife sees her husband tortured in gaol; the husband sees his wife a victim to some horrible disease, lands gone, houses destroyed by flood or fire, and everything in an unutterable plight—the reward of former sins."
Confucius declined absolutely to discuss the supernatural in any form or shape, his one object being to improve human conduct in this life, without attempting to probe that state from which man is divided by death. At the same time, he was no scoffer; for although he declared that "the study of the supernatural is injurious indeed," and somewhat cynically bade his followers "show respect to spiritual beings, but keep them at a distance," yet in another passage we read: "He who offends against God has no one to whom he can pray." Again, when he was seriously ill, a disciple asked if he might offer up prayer. Confucius demurred to this, pointing out that he himself had been praying for a considerable period; meaning thereby that his life had been one long prayer.
CHAPTER XII—THE OUTLOOK
There is a very common statement made by persons who have lived in China—among the people, but not of them—and the more superficial the acquaintance, the more emphatically is the statement made, that the ordinary Chinaman, be he prince or peasant, offers to the Western observer an insoluble puzzle in every department of his life. He is, in fact, a standing enigma; a human being, it may be granted, but one who can no more be classed than his unique monosyllabic language, which still stands isolated and alone.
This estimate is largely based upon some exceedingly false inferences. It seems to be argued that because, in a great many matters, the Chinaman takes a diametrically opposite view to our own, he must necessarily be a very eccentric fellow; but as these are mostly matters of convention, the argument is just as valid against us as against him. "Strange people, those foreigners," he may say, and actually does say; "they make their compass point north instead of south. They take off their hats in company instead of keeping them on. They mount a horse on its left instead of on its right side. They begin dinner with soup instead of dessert, and end it with dessert instead of soup. They drink their wine cold instead of hot. Their books all open at the wrong end, and the lines in a page are horizontal instead of vertical. They put their guests on the right instead of on the left, though it is true that we did that until several hundred years ago. Their music, too, is so funny, it is more like noise; and as for their singing, it is only very loud talking. Then their women are so immodest; striding about in ball-rooms with very little on, and embracing strange men in a whirligig which they call dancing, but very unlike the dignified movements which our male dancers exhibit in the Confucian temple. Their men and women shake hands, though know from our sacred Book of Rites that men and women should not even pass things from one to another, for fear their hands should touch. Then, again, all foreigners, sometimes the women also, carry sticks, which can only be for beating innocent people; and their so-called mandarins and others ride races and row boats, instead of having coolies to do these things for them. They are strange people indeed; very clever at cunning, mechanical devices, such as fire-ships, fire-carriages, and air-cars; but extremely ferocious and almost entirely uncivilized."
Such would be a not exaggerated picture of the mental attitude of the Chinaman towards his enigma, the foreigner. From the Chinaman's imperturbable countenance the foreigner seeks in vain for some indications of a common humanity within; and simply because he has not the wit to see it, argues that it is not there. But there it is all the time. The principles of general morality, and especially of duty towards one's neighbour, the restrictions of law, and even the conventionalities of social life, upon all of which the Chinaman is more or less nourished from his youth upwards, remain, when accidental differences have been brushed away, upon a bed-rock of ground common to both East and West; and it is difficult to see how such teachings could possibly turn out a race of men so utterly in contrast with the foreigner as the Chinese are usually supposed to be. It is certain that anything like a full and sincere observance of the Chinese rules of life would result in a community of human beings far ahead of the "pure men" dreamt of in the philosophy of the Taoists.
As has already been either stated or suggested, the Chinese seem to be actuated by precisely the same motives which actuate other peoples. They delight in the possession of wealth and fame, while fully alive to the transitory nature of both. They long even more for posterity, that the ancestral line may be carried on unbroken. They find their chief pleasures in family life, and in the society of friends, of books, of mountains, of flowers, of pictures, and of objects dear to the collector and the connoisseur. Though a nation of what the Scotch would call "sober eaters," they love the banquet hour, and to a certain extent verify their own saying that "Man's heart is next door to his stomach." In centuries past a drunken nation, some two to three hundred years ago they began to come under the influence of opium, and the abuse of alcohol dropped to a minimum. Opium smoking, less harmful a great deal than opium eating, took the place of drink, and became the national vice; but the extent of its injury to the people has been much exaggerated, and is not to be compared with that of alcohol in the West. It is now, in consequence of recent legislation, likely to disappear, on which result there could be nothing but the warmest congratulations to offer, but for the fact that something else, more insidious and deadly still, is rapidly taking its place. For a time, it was thought that alcohol might recover its sway, and it is still quite probable that human cravings for stimulant of some kind will find a partial relief in that direction. The present enemy, however, and one that demands serious and immediate attention, is morphia, which is being largely imported into China in the shape of a variety of preparations suitable to the public demand. A passage from opium to morphia would be worse, if possible, than from the frying-pan into the fire.
The question has often been asked, but has never found a satisfactory answer, why and how it is that Chinese civilization has persisted through so many centuries, while other civilizations, with equal if not superior claims to permanency, have been broken up and have disappeared from the sites on which they formerly flourished. Egypt may be able to boast of a high level of culture at a remoter date than we can reach through the medium of Chinese records, for all we can honestly claim is that the Chinese were a remarkably civilized nation a thousand years before Christ. That was some time before Greek civilization can be said to have begun; yet the Chinese nation is with us still, and but for contact with the Western barbarian, would be leading very much the same life that it led so many centuries ago.
Some would have us believe that the bond which has held the people together is the written language, which is common to the whole Empire, and which all can read in the same sense, though the pronunciation of words varies in different provinces as much as that of words in English, French, or German. Others have suggested that to the teachings of Confucius, which have outlived the competition of Taoism, Buddhism and other faiths, China is indebted for the tie which has knitted men's hearts together, and enabled them to defy any process of disintegration. There is possibly some truth in all such theories; but these are incomplete unless a considerable share of the credit is allowed to the spirit of personal freedom which seems to breathe through all Chinese institutions, and to unite the people in resistance to every form of oppression. The Chinese have always believed in the divine right of kings; on the other hand, their kings must bear themselves as kings, and live up to their responsibilities as well as to the rights they claim. Otherwise, the obligation is at an end, and their subjects will have none of them. Good government exists in Chinese eyes only when the country is prosperous, free from war, pestilence and famine. Misgovernment is a sure sign that God has withdrawn His mandate from the emperor, who is no longer fit to rule. It then remains to replace the emperor by one who is more worthy of Divine favour, and this usually means the final overthrow of the dynasty.