superstitions peculiar to itself:—some, like the cultivation of the Tao as a rule of life favourable to longevity, come down from the earliest times, and others which grew up during the decay of the Chou dynasty, and subsequently blossomed;—now in mystical speculation; now in the pursuits of alchemy; now in the search for the pills of immortality and the elixir vitae; now in astrological fancies; now in visions of spirits and in magical arts to control them; and finally in the terrors of its purgatory and everlasting hell. Its phases have been continually changing, and at present it attracts our notice more as a degraded adjunct of Buddhism than as a development of the speculations of Laozi and Chuang-tzŭ. Up to its contact with Buddhism, it subsisted as an opposition to the Confucian system, which, while admitting the existence and rule of the Supreme Being, bases its teaching on the study of man’s nature and the enforcement of the duties binding on all men from the moral and social principles of their constitution.
It is only during the present century that the Texts of Taoism have begun to receive the attention which they deserve. Christianity was introduced into China by Nestorian missionaries in the seventh century; and from the Xi’an Monument, which was erected by their successors in 781, nearly 150 years after their first entrance, we perceive that they were as familiar with the books of Laozi and Chuang-tzŭ as with the Confucian literature of the empire, but that monument is the only memorial of them that remains. In the thirteenth century the Roman Catholic Church sent its earliest missionaries to China, but we hardly know anything of their literary labours.
The great Romish mission which continue to the present day began towards the end of the sixteenth century; and there exists now in the India Office a translation of the Tao Te Ching in Latin, which was brought to English by a Mr. Matthew Raper, and presented by him to the Royal Society, of which he was a Fellow, on January 10th, 1788. The manuscript is in excellent preservation, but we do not know by whom