Hu Shih

After learning the language and culture of the Chinese people, these Jesuits began to establish contacts with the young intellectuals of the country.

In such diffused changes of culture two factors are necessary: contact and understanding.

Practically all the prominent leaders of thought in China today are openly agnostics and even atheists.

Within my own life, I read all the beloved novels by lamps of vegetable oil; I saw the Standard Oil invading my own village, I saw gas lamps in the Chinese shops in Shanghai; and I saw their elimination by electric lights.

No student of Chinese history can say that the Chinese are incapable of religious experience, even when judged by the standards of medieval Europe or pious India.

Life and human society are the chief concern of Confucianism and, through it, the chief concern of the Chinese people.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

The Jesuits had learned that a Christian mission to China could never succeed if it were not in a position to show and convince the Chinese intelligentsia of the superiority of the European culture.

The rise of the dramas in the thirteenth century, and the rise of the great novels in a later period, together with their frank glorification of love and the joys of life, may be called the Third Renaissance.

For all the social changes in China can be traced to their early beginnings in the days when the new tools or vehicles of commerce and locomotion first brought the Chinese people into unavoidable contact with the strange ways and novel goods of the Western peoples.

It is true that the Chinese are not so religious as the Hindus, or even as the Japanese; and they are certainly not so religious as the Christian missionaries desire them to be.

The Chinese people, too, went through all kinds of vicissitudes in their religious development.