the right to restrict their activity should it
take a wrong political turn or should an excessive increase in the
number of monks seem a public danger. The Chinese Imperial Government
successfully claimed the strangest powers of ecclesiastical discipline,
since it promoted and degraded not only priests but deities. In both
China and Japan there has often been a strong current of feeling in the
official classes against Buddhism but on the other hand it often had the
support of both emperors and people, and princes not infrequently joined
the clergy, especially when it was desirable for them to live in
retirement. Confucianism and Shintoism, which are ethical and ceremonial
rather than doctrinal, have been in the past to some extent a law to the
governments of China and Japan, or more accurately an aspect of those
governments. But for many centuries Far Eastern statesmen have rarely
regarded Buddhism and Taoism as more than interesting and legitimate
activities, to be encouraged and regulated like educational and
scientific institutions.

21. _Public Worship and Ceremonial_

In no point does Hinduism differ from western religions more than in its
public worship and, in spite of much that is striking and interesting,
the comparison is not to the advantage of India. It is true that temple
worship is not so important for the Hindus as Church services are for
the Christian. They set more store on home ceremonies and on
contemplation. Still the temples of India are so numerous, so
conspicuous and so crowded that the religion which maintains them must
to some extent be judged by them.

At any rate they avoid the faults of public worship in the west. The
practice of arranging the congregation in seats for which they pay seems
to me more irreligious than the slovenliness of the heathen and makes
the whole performance resemble a very dull concert.

Protestant services are in the main modelled on the ritual of the
synagogue. They are meetings of the laity at which the scriptures are
read, prayers offered, sermons preached and benedictions pronounced. The
clergy play a principal but not exclusive part. The rites of the Roman
and Eastern Churches have borrowed much from pagan ceremonial but still
they have not wholly departed from the traditions of the synagogue.
These have also served as a model for Mohammedan ritual which differs
from the Jewish in little but its almost military regularity.

But with all this the ordinary ri