The level monotony of the unvarying conformity of the Chinese to the recognised and accepted typo which their forefathers have made for them, has often been noticed and criticised. Everyone who has looked over the grey roofs of a Chinese city, with its dreary sameness of tiles and mortar, perceives that, with the exception of an ugly pawnshop, or a grotesquely-roofed temple, every building is like its neighbour, offering no aspect of divergence either for the better or worse. So it is with Chinese life. This monotonous dead-level, is, of course, an index to the lethargy of the Chinese mind, and indicative that the nation has not advanced far up the hill of progress, and, without a change for the better, must remain here stationary. We recollect that there is no deviation from conformity of type among the lower forms of life. Every magpie will build its nest with a huge mass of thorny sticks, on the highest branches of the loftiest tree available. On the other hand, every turtle-dove will carelessly throw a afew sticks together, in any exposed spot, provided that the branch is removed a few feet from the ground, and lay its eggs there without fear. Every individual bird, of each species, will act in the same' way, and every successive generation will conform to the same rule. Yet in the nature of things there is no reason why the magpie should go to so much trouble, and the turtle-dove be so free and easy, as far as danger is concerned. Many other examples might be adduced to illustrate this statement that conformity to an accepted model is the rule among animals and birds of the same species, and, in so far as Chinese abide by the same rule, they conform to a lower and not to the most advanced typo of life.
But we are not here concerned so much with the dead monotony of Chinese life in general, as with the absence of nonconformity in the expressed religious life of the people. Here as in other aspects of their domestic, municipal and national life, conformity is the unbroken rule. Herbert Spencer says, " Nothing like that which we now call non-conformity can be traced in societies of simple type. void of knowledge and the mental ten-doneies which lead to criticism and to scepticism, the savage passively accepts whatever his seniors assert. Custom, in the form of established usage, is sacred with him; dissent from it a thing unheard of. And throughout long stages of social evolutica there continues, among results of this trait, the adhesion to inherited religions." Non-conformity therefore, is only possible where there are men sufficiently advanced and educated, to perceive clearly, and to apprehend truths which are hidden from their contemporaries; and who are possessed with suffici¢nt moral and physical courage to announce and maintain these truths, cost what it may.
All non-conformity being a divergence from the accepted type, and at the same time rebellion against recognised authority, has always been frowned on, and as a rule, the non-conformist has been badly treated. Every reader of European Church history knows how all efforts to think about and to interpret Christian dogmas except according to existing rales, throughout Europe, till the dawn of the
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.