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.