And if it be retorted that the mass of the worshipers on Tai Shan are superstitious, so are, and always have been, the mass of worshipers anywhere. Those who rise to religion in any country are few. India, I suspect, is the great exception. But I do not know that they are fewer in China than elsewhere. For that form of religion, indeed, which consists in the worship of natural beauty and what lies behind it—for the religion of a Wordsworth—they seem to be preëminently gifted. The cult of this mountain, and of the many others like it in China, the choice of sites for temples and monasteries, the inscriptions, the little pavilions set up where the view is loveliest—all go to prove this. In England we have lovelier hills, perhaps, than any in China. But where is our sacred mountain? Where, in all the country, the charming mythology which once in Greece and Italy, as now in China, was the outward expression of the love of nature?
倘若众人在泰山的拜神被以“迷信”之名反对，那么从古至今任何地方的拜神都应以迷信论之。世上任何国家的宗教信徒都是少数人，我想印度则是个明显的例外。但我无法理解中国的宗教信徒为何少于世上任何一国。中国人对华兹华斯式的宗教有着特别的天赋，那种宗教崇尚的是自然之美和美之后所隐藏之物。人们对泰山和中国其他名山的仰慕、寺院和庙宇的选址、精美的石刻以及建立于秀丽景色中的各种亭台楼阁都印证了这种天赋。在英格兰，我们的山之秀美堪比中国的任何一座，但我们的“圣山”位居何处？在古希腊、意大利、现今的中国等所有国度都有迷人的神话传说，那么人类对自然之爱的外在表现又在何处寻觅呢？
“Great God, I'd rather be
伟大的神啊，我宁愿是个，A pagan suckled in a creed outworn;
沉浸于旧教规的异教徒，So might I, Standing on this pleasant lea,
站在这令人神怡的草原，Have glimpses that would make me less forlorn.”
看着那缓解我内心之苦的世界。
That passionate cry of a poet born into a naked world would never have been wrung from him had he been born in China.
若是生在中国，这位出生于赤裸世界的诗人绝不会发出那样动情的呐喊。
And that leads me to one closing reflection. When lovers of China—“pro-Chinese,” as they are contemptuously called in the East—assert that China is more civilized than the modern West, even the candid Westerner, who is imperfectly acquainted with the facts, is apt to suspect insincere paradox. Perhaps these few notes on Tai Shan may help to make the matter clearer. A people that can so consecrate a place of natural beauty is a people of fine feeling for the essential values of life. That they should also be dirty, disorganized, corrupt, incompetent, even if it were true—and it is far from being true in any unqualified sense—would be irrelevant to this issue.
以上游历便引发了我这最后的反思。当那些热爱中国的人——如今在东方被蔑称为亲华派——宣称中国比现代西方更加文明时，坦率却对真相一知半解的西方人都对这个有失坦诚的谬论提出质疑。然而，这些关于泰山的文字或许有助于澄清这一事实。一个将自然之美视为神圣的民族一定是一个能够很好感知生活核心价值的民族，尽管这个民族可能会是肮脏、混乱、腐败、无能的——即使果真如此也无关宏旨，况且从广义上讲这远非实情。
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