No More Learning

Whatever their political wisdom
has been, at present it is narrow and barbarous. Jealous lest strangers
should steal their arts--arts which are excelled at Dresden, and other
parts of Europe--they preclude themselves from the great advantages
which arise from an intercourse with civilized nations. Yet, in the laws
which they impose on every foreign ship which enters their ports for
traffic, they even exceed the cunning and avarice of the Dutch. In their
internal policy the military government of Rome under the emperors is
revived, with accumulated barbarism. In every city and province the
military are the constables and peace officers. What a picture is this!
Nothing but Chinese or Dutch industry could preserve the traffic and
population of a country under the control of armed ruffians. But, hence
the emperor has leisure to cultivate his gardens, and to write
despicable odes to his concubines.

Whatever was their most ancient doctrine, certain it is that the
legislators who formed the present system of China presented to their
people no other object of worship than _Tien Kamti_, the material
heavens and their influencing power; by which an intelligent principle
is excluded. Yet, finding that the human mind in the rudest breasts is
conscious of its weakness, and prone to believe the occurrences of life
under the power of lucky or unlucky observances, they permitted their
people the use of sacrifices to those Lucretian gods of superstitious
fear. Nor was the principle of devotion, imprinted by Heaven in the
human heart, alone perverted; another unextinguishable passion was also
misled. On tablets, in every family, are written the names of the last
three of their ancestors, added to each, "Here rests his soul:" and
before these tablets they burn incense, and pay adoration. Confucius,
who, according to their histories, had been in the West about 500 years
before the Christian era, appears to be only the confirmer of their old
opinions; but the accounts of him and his doctrine are involved in
uncertainty. In their places of worship, however, boards are act up,
inscribed, "This is the seat of the soul of Confucius," and to these,
and their ancestors, they celebrate solemn sacrifices, without seeming
to possess any idea of the intellectual existence of the departed soul.
The Jesuit Ricci, and his brethren of the Chinese mission, _very
honestly_ told their converts, that _Tien_ was the God of the
Christians, and that the label of Confucius was the term by which they
expressed His divine majesty.
But, after a long and severe scrutiny at
the court of Rome, Tien was found to signify nothing more than
_heavenly_ or _universal matter_, and the Jesuits of China were ordered
to renounce this heresy. Among all the sects who worship different idols
in China, there is only one which has any tolerable idea of the
immortality of the soul; and among these, says Leland, Christianity at
present obtains some footing. But the most interesting particular of
China yet remains to be mentioned. Conscious of the obvious tendency,
Voltaire and others have triumphed in the great antiquity of the
Chinese, and in the distant period they ascribe to the creation. But the
bubble cannot bear the touch. If some Chinese accounts fix the era of
creation 40000 years ago, others are contented with no less than 884953.
But who knows not that every nation has its Geoffry of Monmouth? And we
have already observed the legends which took their rise from the Annus
Magnus of the Chaldean and Egyptian astronomers, an apparent revolution
of the stars, which in reality has no existence. To the fanciful who
held this Annus Magnus, it seemed hard to suppose that our world was in
its first revolution of the great year, and to suppose that many were
past was easy. And, that this was the case, we have absolute proof in
the doctrines of the Brahmins, who, though they talk of hundreds of
thousands of years which are past, yet confess, that this, the fourth
world, has not yet attained its 6000th year. And much within this
compass are all the credible proofs of Chinese antiquity comprehended.
To three heads all three proofs are reduceable--their form of
government, which, till the conquest of the Tartars in 1644, bore the
marks of the highest antiquity; their astronomical observations; and
their history.

Simply and purely patriarchal, every father was the magistrate in his
own family; and the emperor, who acted by his substitutes, the
Mandarins, was venerated and obeyed as the father of all. The most
passive submission to authority thus branched out was inculcated by
Confucius, and their other philosophers, as the greatest duty of
morality. But, if there is an age in sacred or profane history where the
manners of mankind are thus delineated, no superior antiquity is proved
by the form of Chinese government. Their ignorance of the very ancient
art of ingrafting fruit-trees, and the state of their language (like the
Hebrew in its paucity of words), a paucity characteristic of the ages
when the ideas of men required few syllables to clothe them, prove
nothing farther than the early separation of the Chinese colony{*} from
the rest of mankind; nothing farther, except that they have continued
till very lately without any material intercourse with the other nations
of the world.