Page:Brinkley - China - Volume 3.djvu/64

commercial relations with China has been to teach her the value of force, the tendency of Roman Catholic Propagandism has been to instruct her in the uses of craft.

Ricci—for with him alone need the history of the early Propaganda concern itself, so greatly did he excel his coadjutors in ability and tact—seems to have determined from the outset that a combination, not a conflict, of faiths should be the aim of his practice. Detecting with rare insight that any successful appeal to the educated classes in China must be made through the intellect, not through the emotions, he assumed the part of a professor of secular science rather than that of an expounder of theology; and perceiving that in order to avert the antagonism of the masses, which would be fatal to the prosecution of his work, tolerance of everything tolerable must be his rule of conduct, he set himself to think how far Christianity and the faiths he found in China might be associated without outraging the one or materially altering the other. Of course this inquiry is much easier to students in the twentieth century than it was to Ricci in the sixteenth. Ground comparatively new to him has been explored by numerous sinologues and philosophers whose conclusions are no longer seriously disputed.

The early religion of China—the term "early" being used in the sense of some five thousand years ago—was monotheistic, the