Page:Leaves from my Chinese Scrapbook - Balfour, 1887.djvu/74

 that which is based upon this pernicious doctrine of filial piety. To be filial a man must be a grovelling slave, ready to repudiate his own knowledge and sacrifice his prospects in life at the dictum of a possibly prejudiced and ignorant father. To be filial a man must never dare to cherish a new or independent thought, for his ancestors had never had such thoughts, and would probably have condemned them if they had. Superstition and obstructiveness of the most fatal type are thus made to hinge upon the doctrine of filial piety—which is by no means confined to a domestic application, but runs through the entire social polity of China—just as they were made to hinge upon Church traditions in the Middle Ages. Fanaticism and its offspring cruelty—the spirit that leads men to bind each other's souls and torture each other's bodies—constitute, to our mind, a sin for which a new name ought to be discovered. It may almost be called sacrilege against the human race, and this is the unpardonable sin, or what should be considered such by all wishers for the mental and corporeal enfranchisement of their fellow-men. The worst feature of it all is, that the evil of which we complain, like evil in the abstract, is simply poisoned and distorted good. Reverence for parents is a natural and human feeling. It has been the mainspring of some of the most beautiful actions ever performed by men. No one will dispute the propriety of the Chinese in placing the relation of paternity and sonhood among the five primary relationships of mankind. But where it is pushed to such an extreme as it is in China, where the father is endowed with the authority of an absolute and irresponsible despot, and the son lowered to being the slave of another man simply because that