Page:The Spirit of the Chinese People.djvu/136

 chapel or shrine—which is in the house of every respectable family, even the poorest in China. This ancestral temple, chapel or shrine with a tablet or red piece of paper on the wall, as I have said elsewhere, is the church of the State Religion of Confucius in China corresponding to the church of the Church Religion in Christian countries.

This ceremony—the temple presentation begins by the father of the bride groom or failing him, the nearest senior member of the family, going on his knees before the ancestral tablet—thus announcing to the spirits of the dead ancestors that a young member of the family has now brought a wife home into the family. Then the bride groom and bride one after the other, each goes on his and her knees before the same ancestral tablet. From this moment the man and woman becomes husband and wife,—not only before the moral Law or God,—but before the Family, before the State, before Civic Law. I have therefore called this ceremony of miao chien, temple presentation in the Chinese marriage,—the civic or civil marriage. Before this civic or civil marriage, the woman, the bride,—according to the Book of Rites,—is not a legal wife (不廟見不成婦). When the bride happens to die before this ceremony of temple presentation, she is not allowed—according to the Book of Rites—to be buried in the family burying ground of her husband and her memorial tablet is not put up in the ancestral temple of his family clan.