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CHRONOLOGICAL SYLLABUS

Legendary Period (Twenty-ninth Century to Tenth Century B.C.)--P'an Ku and Creation--First Worship of Spirits--Worship of God, with incense--Sacrifices to Mountains and Rivers--Worship of Sun, Moon, and Stars--Institution of Ancestral Worship--God enjoys music, dancing,

and burnt offerings--God resents bad government--Revelation in a
Dream--Anthropomorphism--Fetishism--No Devil--No Hell--Terms for
God--The Character for "God" is a picture of a Man--God and Jehovah--God
in the Odes--Hou Chi and Parthenogenesis--Superstitions and
Supernatural Manifestations--Sacrifice--Ancestral Worship--Filial Piety.

Feudal Age (Tenth Century to Third Century B.C.)--The Influence of Confucianism--His Agnosticism--Weakening of Supernatural Beliefs--Consolidation of Confucianism--Human Sacrifices--Prayers for Rain--The Philosophy of Taoism--A Rival to Confucianism--But uniting to weaken the old Monotheistic Faith--Its Theory of Spirits--Modifications of Taoism--The Elixir of Life--Evidences of a Spiritual World--Mysticism.

The Empire (Third Century B.C. to modern times)--Arguments against a Spiritual World--Attributes of God--Good and Evil--Buddhism appears--Conflict of Faiths--Struggle between Buddhism and Taoism--Taoism borrows from Buddhism and becomes a Religion--Mazdeism appears--Followed closely by Mahometanism, Nestorian Christianity, and Manichaeism--Mahometanism alone survived--Jews arrived about Eleventh Century A.D.--Chu Hsi materialised the Confucian Canon--Henceforward Agnosticism the rule for literati--Buddhism and Taoism (both debased) for the Masses--The Jesuits arrive in the Sixteenth Century--Protestant Missionaries date from 1799.

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