. We were frequently pressed to eat with them and in the
evening when the last guest had departed the "chief mourner" brought us
some delicious fruit candied in black sugar. She told Wu that they had fed
three hundred people during the day and we could well believe it. The next
morning the coffin was carried down the hill to the accompaniment of
anguished wails and we were left once more to the peace and quiet of our
beautiful temple courtyard.

Sometimes a family will plunge itself into debt for generations to come to
provide a suitable funeral for one of its members, because to bury the dead
without the proper display would not only be to "lose face" but subject
them to the possible persecution of the angered spirits. This is only one
of the pernicious results of ancestor worship and it is safe to say that
most of the evils in China's social order today can be traced, directly or
indirectly, to this unfortunate practice.

A man's chief concern is to leave male descendants to worship at his grave
and appease his spirit. The more sons, grandsons, and great-grandsons who
walk in his funeral procession, the more he is to be envied. As a
missionary humorously says "the only law of God that ever has been obeyed
in China is to be fruitful and multiply." Craving for progeny has brought
into existence thousands upon thousands of human beings who exist on the
very brink of starvation. Nowhere in the civilized world is there a more
sordid and desperate struggle to maintain life or a more hopeless poverty.
But fear and self-love oblige them to continue their blind breeding. The
apparent atrophy of the entire race is due to ancestor worship which binds
it with chains of iron to its dead and to its past, and not until these
bonds are severed can China expect to take her place among the progressive
nations of the earth.

CHAPTER XIX

ACROSS THE YANGTZE GORGE

In mid-November we left the White Water with a caravan of twenty-six mules
and horses. Following the road from Li-chiang to the Yangtze, we crossed
the "Black Water" and climbed steadily upward over several tremendous
wooded ridges, each higher than the last, to the summit of the divide.

The descent was gradual through a magnificent pine and spruce forest. Some
of the trees were at least one hundred and fifty feet high, and were draped
with beautiful gray moss which had looped itself from branch to branch and
hung suspended in delicate streamers yards in length. T