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On July 26, 1916, I announced to all my friends in America that from now on I resolved to write no more poems in the classical language, and to begin my experiments in writing poetry in the so-called vulgar tongue of the people.

Hu Shih

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.

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.

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

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

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

Hu Shih

Culture

Understanding

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

And lastly, the political revolutions from 1911 to the present time have done more to bring about tremendous social changes everywhere than even the economic and industrial changes and the new schools.

And revolutions always mean the breakdown of old authority.

Hu Shih

Authority

Old

Another important historical factor is the fact that this already very simple religion was further simplified and purified by the early philosophers of ancient China. Our first great philosopher was a founder of naturalism; and our second great philosopher was an agnostic.

But I wish to point out that it is entirely wrong to say that the Chinese are not religious.

Hu Shih

Religious

Wrong

Only when we realize that there is no eternal, unchanging truth or absolute truth can we arouse in ourselves a sense of intellectual responsibility.

On the basis of biological, sociological, and historical knowledge, we should recognize that the individual self is subject to death or decay, but the sum total of individual achievement, for better or worse, lives on in the immortality of The Larger.

In the year 1915 a series of trivial incidents led some Chinese students in Cornell University to take up the question of reforming the Chinese language.