for their own particular pleasure; we certainly meet no cases of evil
spirits wishing to undermine man's allegiance to God, or desiring to
make people wicked in order to secure their everlasting punishment. The
vision of Purgatory, with all its horrid tortures, was introduced into
China by Buddhism, and was subsequently annexed by the Taoists, some
time between the third and sixth centuries A.D.

Chinese Terms for God.--Before passing to the firmer ground,
historically speaking, of the Chou dynasty, it may be as well to state
here that there are two terms in ancient Chinese literature which seem
to be used indiscriminately for God. One is _T'ien_, which has come
to include the material heavens, the sky; and the other is _Shang Ti_,
which has come to include the spirits of deceased Emperors. These two
terms appear simultaneously, so to speak, in the earliest documents
which have come down to us, dating back to something like the twentieth
century before Christ. Priority, however, belongs beyond all doubt to
_T'ien_, which it would have been more natural to find meaning, first
the visible heavens, and secondly the Deity, whose existence beyond the
sky would be inferred from such phenomena as lightning, thunder, wind,
and rain. But the process appears to have been the other way, so far at
any rate as the written language is concerned. The Chinese script, when
it first came into existence, was purely pictorial, and confined to
visible objects which were comparatively easy to depict. There does not
seem to have been any attempt to draw a picture of the sky. On the other
hand, the character _T'ien_ was just such a representation of a human
being as would be expected from the hand of a prehistoric artist;
and under this unmistakable shape the character appears on bells and
tripods, as seen in collections of inscriptions, so late as the sixth
and seventh centuries B.C., after which the head is flattered to a line,
and the arms are raised until they form another line parallel to that of