Century contributing to the legend that there existed in the
capital a Grand and Fearful Panjandrum for whom no miracle was too
great and to whom people and officials owed trembling obedience.

In reality, the office of emperor was never more than a politico-
religious concept, translated for the benefit of the masses into
socio-economic ordinances. These pronouncements, cast in the form
of periodic homilies called Edicts, were the ritual of government;
their purpose was instructional rather than mandatory; they were
designed to teach and keep alive the State-theory that the Emperor
was the High Priest of the Nation and that obedience to the
morality of the Golden Age, which had been inculcated by all the
philosophers since Confucius and Mencius flourished twenty-five
centuries ago, would not only secure universal happiness but
contribute to national greatness.

The office of Emperor was thus heavenly rather than terrestrial,
and suasion, not arms, was the most potent argument used in
everyday life. The amazing reply (i.e., amazing to foreigners)
made by the great Emperor K'ang-hsi in the tremendous Eighteenth
Century controversy between the Jesuit and the Dominican
missionaries, which ruined the prospects of China's ever becoming
Roman Catholic and which the Pope refused to accept--that the
custom of ancestor-worship was political and not religious--was
absolutely correct, POLITICS IN CHINA UNDER THE EMPIRE BEING ONLY
A SYSTEM OF NATIONAL CONTROL EXERCISED BY INCULCATING OBEDIENCE TO
FOREBEARS. The great efforts which the Manchus made from the end
of the Sixteenth Century (when they were still a small Manchurian
Principality striving for the succession to the Dragon Throne and
launching desperate attacks on the Great Wall of China) to receive