But now a new factor has entered into this problem. Western materialism is spreading its malign influence over China; the educated classes of Japan boldly profess that they have long since ceased to believe in any religion, and they are calling upon China with great effect to follow their example, and so the position changes altogether. Ancestor worship, {161} with all its accompanying superstition, tends to disappear where Western knowledge is taught. The Boxers were not untrue prophets when they told their people that they or Western civilisation, as they knew it, must leave China, and that they could not co-exist. The position is surely one that must excite the very deepest interest. It is scarcely conceivable that a race so deeply convinced of the realities of the spiritual world will, as a whole, accept the belief that there are no spirits. It is equally inconceivable that with modern Western education the people shall believe in the spirit that follows the junk, or in the spirit that is angered by a mining operation. The religious sentiment of China will, as it were, be turned out of doors by Western knowledge. There will be a terrible moment when, with all the insolence of youth, the young man refuses to believe in God or in a devil, and rushes into every wild anarchical and socialistic scheme to satisfy his craving for action. It is a terrible moment, and one which one sees rapidly developing in Japan and among the Westernised Chinese; but beyond that terrible period there dawns a brighter day when China will reassert its natural sentiment and will accept Christianity as the only reasonable religion that is consonant with modern science and a belief in the spiritual world. The question of policy that needs solving is whether it is wise in the face of this great Western unbelieving movement to treat respect for {162} ancestors too drastically. Western education must remove its objectionable features and Christianity might accept the modified form of this belief which is not wholly inconsistent with the doctrine of the resurrection of the dead. {163} CHAPTER XIII CONFUCIAN PHILOSOPHY AND WESTERN CULTURE