Viewing page 104 of 187

This transcription has been completed. Contact us with corrections.

101

Macmillan Company, the first royalty on the Rabbit Lantern. Some excitement.

Wednesday, 7 October

We had a fine Chinese meal this noon with all of the Chinese teachers of the Y. S. C. S. at a restaurant near the new school. The occasion was to give Dr. Rawlinson a chance to meet the teachers, and to have a little discussion meeting with them about religion and the problems of Christians. It was, as I said, a good lunch, and the crowd was good. Rawlinson made a rather ordinary little talk, which Porter translated (Rawlinson's Shanghai dialect does not go in Peking), and then he turned the meeting open for questions. I was disappointed. He lost the more learned of the men by  considering Confucianism a religion, which no Chinese scholar does unless you first lay down your definition of religion and adhere to it in discussion. The popular thing to do is to make a definition of religion which will include both Confucianism and Christianity, and then, having got Confucius in, to forget the door by which he entered, the promise by which he was enticed into the discussion. The Chinese scholar views Confucianism as a philosophy, and the distinction between it and popular Buddhism and Taoism as well as common Christianity is marked. The speaker said that the world religion must be bigger than western Christianity, but he assumed that the world religion will be Christianity, which must, he said, in China, build itself upon Confucianism and the things that are common to both doctrines. [[strikethrough]] In his discussion he [[/strikethrough]] I am not at all sure that Christianity will be the final religion. In fact I think it will not. It will make its controbution, perhaps the major contribution, but the final religion of the world will not, I feel sure, bear a distinctive name, which has in the past always represented sectarianism in spirit and a large amount of divisiveness.  Neither will it be any other now existing religion or system. I would not discourage the propagation of any faith, for the more earnestly sundry faiths are propagated the quicker is the day of reckoning and synthesis. But I'm getting off. Rawlinson did some pretty bad evading on the questions in the discussion. He seldom answered a question directly and generally embarked on a tan-