CHAPTER XV
THE SEAMY SIDE OF CHINESE LIFE
Some of the moral aspects of the Chinese—Their religion takes no cognizance of men’s lives—Heaven looks after great moral questions—Objectionable features of Chinese society—Unchaste—Foul-mouthed—Passion for gambling—Instances given—Lawless classes numerous—Opium vice—Evil results.
The comparatively elevated moral condition of Chinese society is very often a source of pleasure and at the same time of perplexity to strangers who have lived long amongst them, and who have narrowly watched them in their social and domestic life. This state of things has not been produced by the popular form of religion that is practised amongst them, for that never seems to influence their lives in the slightest degree. A man, for example, of notoriously bad character will come and make the most lavish offerings to a certain idol in whom he has the most implicit faith. He will stand in a most reverent manner before it, and he will beseech it to bestow blessings upon him and his home, and to save him from calamity and suffering, and when he turns to go home he is just the same man as he was before he came into the temple.
The idols are not supposed to have anything to do with character. The thief, and the prodigal, and the gambler join in the crowd that wind their way up the hillside to the shrine, say, of the Goddess of Mercy, and they burn their incense and make their offerings to the benevolent-looking idol, whilst she, with a smile that seems to be struggling through her gentle features, looks apparently with complacency upon them all alike, and the hardened sinner and the shy, shrinking young wife are both treated as though they were the same in her eyes.
There are two forces, quite outside of any of those that are supposed to exist in the common religion of the people, that exercise a tremendous influence for righteousness in all the various phases of Chinese life, and are usually referred to as The Principles of Heaven. This phrase is used whenever any question of morals is at stake, or perhaps some principle of righteousness is involved, and it has a potency about it that nothing in the whole range of Chinese thought could in any way equal.
An idol is never appealed to to confirm some statement about which there may be a dispute, but Heaven is, and it is felt that when this is done, the person who has dared to call upon that great name to be a witness as it were to the truth of what has been said, he is not to be lightly disbelieved. Heaven has eyes, it is commonly asserted, and when a person recklessly holds up his hand to Heaven and asks it to attest to something he knows to be false, it is confidently believed that ere long some signal manifestation of its anger will be witnessed in the disasters that will be hurled upon him and his family.
Any violations of the great law of justice or any injury done to another man’s character are things that Heaven is supposed to look upon with a very jealous eye, and it is its part to see that due punishment shall be inflicted upon the transgressor when the proper time comes. The writings of Confucius and Mencius, the two great sages of China, have done much to keep alive this idea, and as these really are a kind of Bible to the nation, the influence they have exerted upon the scholars and thinkers of each generation, and through them upon the people at large, has been on the whole of a most beneficial kind.
Now it is very extraordinary, that whilst it is firmly believed that in cases of conscience, or in matters that involve great moral questions, Heaven always interferes to punish the wrongdoer, no one thinks that any vices that a man may commit for his own personal gratification are looked upon as improper by this great Power, or that it will take the trouble of inquiring into his conduct and of meting out either rewards or punishment for it.