serious error.  It means a class of men who are the superintendents of religion, but also more.  On the one side, though they may have serious political differences with the Government, they are usually in touch with it:  on the other, though they may dislike reformers and movements from below, they patronize and minister to popular sentiment.  They are closely connected with education and learning and sometimes with the law.  But in China there is no class which unites all these features.  Learning, law and education are represented by the Confucian scholars or literati.  Though no one would think of calling them priests, yet they may offer official sacrifices, like Roman magistrates.  Though they are contemptuous of popular superstition, yet they embody the popular ideal.  It is the pride of a village to produce a scholar.  But the scholarship of the literati is purely Confucian:  Buddhist and Taoist learning have no part in it.

The priest, whether Buddhist or Taoist, is not in the mind of the people the repository of learning and law.  He is not in religious matters the counterpart of the secular arm, but rather a private practitioner, duly licensed but of no particular standing.  But he is skilful in his own profession:  he has access to the powers who help, pity and console, and even the sceptic seeks his assistance when confronted with the dangers of this world and the next.

The student of Chinese history may object that at many periods, notably under the Yuan dynasty, the Buddhist clergy were officially recognized as an educational body and even received the title of Kuo-shih or teacher of the people.  This is true.  Such recognition by no means annihilated the literati, but it illustrates the decisive influence exercised by the Emperor and the court.  We have, on the one side, a learned official class, custodians of the best national ideals but inclined to reject emotion and speculation as well as superstition:  on the other, two priesthoods, prone to superstition but legitimately strong in so far as they satisfied the emotional and speculative instincts.  The literati held persistently, though respectfully, to the view that the Emperor should be a Confucianist pure and simple, but Buddhism and Taoism had such strong popular support that it was always safe and often politic for an Emperor to patronize them.  Hence an Emperor of personal convictions was able to turn the balance, and it must be added that Buddhism often flourished in the courts of weak and dissolute Emperors who were in the hands of women and eunuchs.  Some of these latter were among its most distinguished devotees.