We have seen how the moral ideal of a people is modified by all the changing circumstances of their life and history. The moral ideal of the Chinese has undergone little modification for upward of two millenniums, such, for instance, as the ideal of the European peoples has undergone in a like period, because throughout this long term the influences acting upon the national life have been practically unchanged. There have been in Chinese history no such interminglings of races, revivals in learning, religious reformations, and political and industrial revolutions as mark the history of the Western nations, and responding to which the moral evolution of these peoples has gone on apace. But now that the long-continued isolation of China has been broken, and she is being subjected to all the potent influences of the civilization of the West, it is certain that her social and mental life will be remolded and cast in new forms. Sooner or later constitutional government must supersede, has already superseded, the patriarchal government of the past; the whole social fabric must necessarily be reconstructed and the individual instead of the family or clan be made the social and ethical unit;[189] the science of the Western nations will displace, is already displacing, the obsolete learning of the Four Classics; Christianity will quicken the atrophied religious consciousness of the race; and in place of the isolation of the past there will be established those international relations and intellectual exchanges which perhaps more than all other agencies combined have been the motive force of European civilization and progress. This new environment, these new influences molding afresh Chinese social, intellectual, and religious life and institutions, cannot fail to react powerfully upon the moral ideal of the nation. It too must inevitably undergo a great change. There will be a shifting in the standard of character of the different virtues, for the moral ideal of a simple patriarchal community cannot serve as the model for a complex modern society, and doubtless some of those virtues--as, for instance, reverence for the past--which now hold the highest rank in the code will exchange places with others at present held in little esteem. Changes in the feelings and beliefs of the people in regard to ancestor worship, which changes are inevitable, will effect important modifications in family ethics. The substitution of Western science for the lore of the classics will introduce evolutionary ethics and the philosophical virtues of the Western world; while the substitution of popular government for the patriarchal autocracy will necessarily bring in the ethics of democracy.