quoted from Professor Muller, the emperor countenances both the Taoist
worship and the Buddhist, he does so for reasons of state;--to please
especially his Buddhist subjects in Thibet and Mongolia, and not to
offend the many whose superstitious fancies incline to Taoism.

When I went out and in as a missionary among the Chinese people for
about thirty years, it sometimes occurred to me that only the inmates
of their monasteries and the recluses of both systems should be
enumerated as Buddhists and Taoists; but I was in the end constrained
to widen that judgment, and to admit a considerable following of both
among the people, who have neither received the tonsure nor assumed
the yellow top. Dr. Eitel, in concluding his discussion of this point
in his "Lecture on Buddhism, an Event in History," says: "It is not
too much to say that most Chinese are theoretically Confucianists,
but emotionally Buddhists or Taoists. But fairness requires us to add
that, though the mass of the people are more or less influenced by
Buddhist doctrines, yet the people, as a whole, have no respect for
the Buddhist church, and habitually sneer at Buddhist priests." For
the "most" in the former of these two sentences I would substitute
"nearly all;" and between my friend's "but" and "emotionally" I would
introduce "many are," and would not care to contest his conclusion
farther. It does seem to me preposterous to credit Buddhism with the
whole of the vast population of China, the great majority of whom are
Confucianists. My own opinion is, that its adherents are not so many
as those even of Mohammedanism, and that instead of being the most
numerous of the religions (so called) of the world, it is only
entitled to occupy the fifth place, ranking below Christianity,
Confucianism, Brahmanism, and Mohammedanism, and followed, some
distance off, by Taoism. To make a table of percentages of mankind,
and assign to each system its proportion, is to seem to be wise where