CHAPTER XIV.
TREE AND SERPENT WORSHIP.
In spite of the many praises that have been lavished upon the Chinese for the comparative purity of their religions, it is nevertheless a fact that some of the lowest forms of superstition are to be found in Chinese popular worship. In saying this we do no injustice to the higher developments of the various national religions. We are not unmindful of the pristine monotheistic worship which prevailed in China centuries before Confucianism was known. We do not refer to the Worship of Ancestors, the belief in Fêng-shui, or even the baser developments of the systems of Buddhism and Tao. But we presume that in every country there may be found those who, irrespective of the religion they profess, have hewn out of their individual consciousness ideas unrecognised by their own sacred books, and adopted as objects of worship things which were never contemplated as such by the framers of the religion in question. We have known, for instance, of an Irish Catholic servant being found in the kitchen, on her knees, worshipping the moon; and not the bitterest Protestant will venture to affirm that Popery even in its extremest forms has any room in its pantheon for the lunar goddess. And so in China; here,—irrespective even of that form of Nature-worship of
