Confucius aims at peace, order, outward prosperity, virtue, and good morals.

All this belongs also to Christianity, but Christianity adds a moral enthusiasm, a faith in the spiritual world, a hope of immortal life, a sense of the Fatherly presence of God.

So that here, as before, we find that Christianity does not exclude other religions, but includes them, and is distinguished by being deeper, higher, broader, and more far-reaching than they.
A people with such institutions and such a social life as we have described cannot be despised, and to call them uncivilized is as absurd in us as it is in them to call Europeans barbarians.

They are a good, intelligent, and happy people.

Lieutenant Forbes, who spent five years in China,--from 1842 to 1847,--says: "I found myself in the midst of as amiable, kind, and hospitable a population as any on the face of the earth, as far ahead of us in some things as behind us in others." As to the charge of dishonesty brought against them by those who judge the whole nation by the degraded population of the suburbs of Canton, Forbes says, "My own property suffered more in landing in England and passing the British frontier than in my whole sojourn in China." "There is no nation," says the Jesuit Du Halde, "more laborious and temperate than this.