What shall the Christian missionary in these circumstances do with the native doctrine of retribution? He will assure the people that there is revealed in the Christian Scriptures a retribution just, comprehensive, and inevitable. He may allude to the modern origin of the Ten judges, and condemn the Sung philosophers for their insincerity in allowing, if not inventing, this mythological creation. He may proceed to condemn the Buddhist also for teaching that Yama is judge in the invisible world, when, according to their own metaphysics, Yama is nothing; and for urging the Chinese to accept a doctrine of hell punishments which they teach, not as what they

really believe, but as a means to an end. In this they set an example of false teaching which the Confucianists were only too ready to accept and imitate. The Christian retribution will come before the Chinese mind on quite a different footing, as resting on the instruction of a divine Saviour.

But let us be candid in acknowledging the aid we receive from Buddhists in previously spreading far and wide among the people the idea of a moral retribution; for this helps us to bring over more quickly to the understanding of the Christian faith on this point, any of the population who are familiar with the Buddhist teaching.

This is the case even with sects like the Sin-siu in Japan. That sect professes to believe in absorption into the absolute. Many Buddhists profess to take the Western heaven as the goal of their hopes. But these beliefs or aspirations are capable of being reconciled with beliefs in the heavens and hells of the metempsychosis, and they are actually taught along with them. Even the most metaphysical Buddhists, and those who have the most abstruse notion possible of the Nirvana, still teach as exoteric doctrine the metempsychosis as known in India.

That I am not wrong in imputing to the literati who belonged to the later Sung dynasty, and especially Chu Hi, a principal part in the encouragement of the popular belief in future retribution, may be shown by the chronology. The author of the Yu-li, a Tauist named Tan Chi, who was the first to give currency to the legend of the Ten royal judges, lived more than a century before Chu Chi. The two brothers, Ch'eng Ming-tau and Cheng Yi-chwen, lived a little before Tan Chi, in the early part of the eleventh century. The elder died the year before the Yu-li was made; the younger lived for nearly twenty years after. Then came the time of Hwei-tsung, who is said to have deified Chang Yi with the title Yu-hwang to-ti, and who was carried with his son into Tartary a prisoner under the Nu-chih dynasty. This was the period