XVIII

OF CHINA

DARE WE speak of the Chinese, without having recourse to their own annals? They are confirmed by the unanimous opinion of our travellers of different sects, Jacobins, Jesuits, Lutherans, Calvinists, all interested in contradicting them. It is evident, that the empire of China was formed upwards of four thousand years ago. This people of antiquity never heard any mention made of those physical revolutions, of those inundations, those fiery devastations, the slight remembrance of which is preserved and changed in the fables of the deluge of Deucalion, and the fall of Phaeton. The climate of China was therefore preserved from these scourges, as it always was from the plague, literally speaking, which has made such frequent ravages in Africa, Asia, and Europe.

If any annals carry with them the stamp of certainty, they are those of China, which have united, as has been already said, the history of heaven with that of earth. Singular from every other people, they have constantly marked their epochas by eclipses, and the conjunctions of the planets; and our astronomers, who have examined their calculations, have been surprised to find them almost all just. Other nations invented allegorical fables, and the Chinese wrote their history with the pen and the astrolabe in their hand, with such simplicity as cannot be equalled in the rest of Asia.

Each reign of their emperors was written by contemporaries; there are no different methods of reckoning amongst them, no contradictory chronologies. Our travelling missionaries candidly relate, that when they spoke to the wife emperor Camhi, of the chronology of the Vulgate, of the Septuagint, and the Samaritan, Camhi replied to them, is it possible that the books you believe in are at variance?

The Chinese wrote upon thin tablets of bamboo, when the Chaldeans did not yet write upon anything but bricks; and they have still some ancient tablets, which their varnishes have preserved from rotting. These are perhaps the most ancient monuments in the world. They have no history before that of their emperors, no fictions, no prodigies, no inspired men, who called themselves demi-gods, as with the Egyptians and Greeks: when these people write, they write reasonably.

They particularly differ from other nations in their history, making no mention of a college of priests, who ever controlled their laws. The Chinese do not refer to those savage times, when it was necessary for men to be cheated in order to be guided. Other people began their history by the origin of the world; the Zend of the Persians, the Vedam of the Indians, Sanchoniaton, Manetho; in fine, down to Hesiod, they all trace things back to their origin and the formation of the world. The Chinese have not been guilty of this folly; their history comprehends no other than historical times.

In this place above all others, we should apply our great principle, that a nation whose first chronicles attest the existence of a vast empire, powerful and wise, must have been assembled as a body of people for antecedent ages. Here is a people, who, for upwards of four thousand years, daily write their annals. Again, would it not be madness to disbelieve that to be expert in all the arts necessary to society, even so far as to write, and to write well, more time was necessary than the Chinese empire has subsisted, in reckoning only from the emperor Tohi, till now? None of the literati of China doubt that the Five Kings existed two thousand three hundred years before our vulgar era. This monument, then, is four hundred years anterior to the first Babylonian observations sent into Greece by Calisthenes. Does it really become the literati of Paris to contest the antiquity of a Chinese book, considered as authentic by all the tribunals of China?

The first rudiments of every kind are always slower in their progress than the more advanced stages. Let us constantly remember, that five hundred years ago scarce any one knew how to write, either in the North, in Germany or France. Those tallies, which bakers still use, were our hieroglyphics, and our books of account. There is no other kind of arithmetic used in collecting the taxes; and the name of tallies are still a proof of it in the country. Our capricious customs, which were not revised by writing, till within these four hundred and fifty years, sufficiently teach us how scarce the art of writing then was. There are no people in Europe, who have not latterly made more progress within half a century in all the arts, than they had made from the time of the invasions of the Barbarians, till the fourteenth century.

I shall not here examine why the Chinese, who were arrived at the knowledge and practice of every thing that was useful in society, did not go as far as we do at present in the sciences: they are, I allow, as bad physicians as we were two hundred years ago, and as the Greeks and Romans; but they brought morality to perfection, which is the first of the sciences.

Their vast and populous empire was already governed like a family, whose monarch was the father; and forty of whose legislative tribunals were considered as the elder brothers, whilst we were wandering in the forest of the Ardennes.

Their religion was simple, wise, august, free from all superstition and all barbarity, ere we had yet Theutats, to whom the Druids sacrificed the children of our ancestors, in great osier baskets.

The Chinese emperors themselves offered to the God of the Universe, to Chang-ti, to the Tien, to the principle of all things, the first fruits of their harvest twice a year, and even of those harvests which they had sown with their own hands. This custom was kept up for upwards of forty centuries, in the midst of revolutions, and even the most horrid calamities.

Never was the religion of the emperors and of the tribunals dishonored with impostures; never was it troubled with quarrels between the priests and the empire; never was it burdened with absurd innovations, which are supported one against the other by arguments as absurd as themselves, the rage of which has at length placed the poignard in the hands of fanatics led on by the factious. Here the Chinese are particularly superior to all the nations of the universe.

Their Confucius framed neither new opinions nor new rites. He neither pretended to be an inspired man, nor a prophet. He was a magistrate, who taught the ancient laws. We sometimes say, very improperly, “the religion of Confucius”; he had no other than that of all the emperors and all the tribunals; no other than that of the first sages; he recommends nothing but virtue, preaches no mysteries; he says, in his first book, that in order to learn to govern, we should pass our whole life in correcting ourselves; in the second, he proves that God has himself graven virtue in the heart of man; he says that man is not born wicked, and that he becomes so by his own fault; the third is a collection of pure maxims, where we can meet with nothing that is mean, nor any ridiculous allegories. He had five thousand disciples, he might have put himself at the head of a powerful party; but he rather chose to instruct men, than to govern them.

The temerity we have shewn, at the extremity of the west, of judging of this eastern court, and imputing atheism to them, has been vehemently attacked in an Essay upon General History. What, in fact, must have been the rage of some amongst us, to call an empire atheistical, when almost all its laws are founded upon the knowledge of a Supreme Being, Requiter, and Avenger? The inscriptions of their temples, of which we have authentic copies, are, “To the first principle, without beginning and without end: he has done all, and governs all: he is infinitely good, infinitely just: he enlightens, he supports, and regulates all nature.”

The Jesuits, who are disliked in Europe, are reproached with flattering the atheists of China. A Frenchman, named Maigret, bishop of Conon, who did not understand a word of Chinese, was deputed by a pope, to go and try causes upon the spot; he treated Confucius as an atheist, upon these words of that great man, “Heaven has given me virtue, man cannot hurt me.” The greatest of our saints never uttered a more celestial maxim. If Confucius was an atheist, so were Cato and the chancellor L’Hospital.

Let us here repeat and put calumny to the blush; that the same man who opposed Bayle, by asserting that a society of atheists was impossible, at the same time advanced, that the most ancient government upon earth was a society of atheists. We cannot be too much ashamed of our contradictions.

Let us again repeat that the literati of China, adorers of the one and only God, abandoned the people to the superstition of the Bonzes. They received the sect of Laokium, that of Fo, and several others. The magistrates conceived that the people might have different religions from that of the state, as they live upon grosser aliment; they suffered the Bonzes, and continued them. In almost every other country, those who carried on the trade of Bonzes, had the principal authority.

It is true, that the laws of China do not mention rewards and punishments after death; they did not choose to affirm what they did not know. This difference between them, and all the great polished people, is very astonishing. The doctrine of hell was useful, and the government of the Chinese never admitted it. They imagined, that an exact policy constantly exercised, would have greater effect than opinions, which might be opposed; and that the people would fear a law always present, more than one in future. We shall, in the proper places, mention a people infinitely less considerable, who had nearly the same idea, or who rather had no idea, but which was propagated by means unknown to other men.

Let us resume here, only to add that the empire of China subsisted with splendor, when the Chaldeans began the course of those nineteen hundred years astronomical observations, which were sent into Greece by Callisthenes. The Bramins then reigned in a part of India; the Persians had their laws; the Arabians to the south, and the Scythians to the north, had no other habitations than tents. Egypt, which we are now going to speak of, was a powerful kingdom.