Book XIX.
Chap. 17, & 18.to accomplish that by punishments, which it is not in their power to produce, that is, to give habits of morality. By punishments a subject is very justly cut off from society, who having lost the purity of his manners, violates the laws; but if all the world were to lose their moral habits, would these re-establish them? Punishments may be justly inflicted to put a stop to many of the consequences of the general evil, but it will not remove the evil itself. Thus when the principles of the Chinese government were discarded, and morality lost, the state fell into anarchy, and revolutions were seen to take place.
CHAP. XVIII.
A Consequence drawn from the preceding Chapter.
FROM hence it follows that the laws of China are not destroyed by conquest. Their customs, manners, laws, and religion, being the same thing, they cannot change all these at once; and as it will happen, that either the conqueror or the conquered must change, in China it has always been the conqueror. For the manners of the conquering nations not being its customs, nor its customs its laws, nor its laws its religion, it has been more easy for them to conform by degrees to the vanquished people, than the vanquished people to them.
There still follows from hence a very unhappy consequence, which is, that it is almost impossible for[1] Christianity ever to be established in China.
- ↑ See the reasons given by the Chinese magistrates in their decrees for proscribing the Christian religion. Edifying Letters, 1-th Collect.
