Three Chinese Philosophies of Old
To Three Uses of the Law mould.

The first be Legalism by disciplined means,
To control chaos and punish fiends.

The second be vain symbolic Confucian rites,
To foreshadow Christ, the true sacrifice.

The last be Mohism with universal love,
To raise the spirit to Heaven above

Discerning the works of Providence, it may be inferred, not unreasonably, that the defeat of China during the Opium Wars was the exactment God’s vengeance against China for rejecting the Nestorian and Jesuit missionaries, and trampling the Gospel under foot by our vicious persecution of them.

It has pleased God the Father to turn to his instruments of wrath, after we have despised the easy yoke of persuasion, and raze our arrogant Empire utterly to the ground that we may learn through pain and crushing humiliation what we have refused to learn through reason, to fear and reverence the name of the King of kings.

And also to teach us that though we have received the purest form of natural theology of all the nations of the world, it is no good before God if we suppress the true Light which our natural lights illuminate, and which lesson God reinforces rigorously by raising up a barbarous people to crush us underfoot that we may learn through fire and woe that God is indeed no respecter of persons as far as obedience to the Gospel is concerned.

For the crimes of hyper Confucian Orthodoxy, or vain excessive reverence of our ancestors, for which cause the Gospel was suppressed, it has been the Father’s good pleasure, to purge China of its Confucianism, under whose vain rituals and rites China has long groaned in oppression, and restore once more its original Chinese Legalist Constitution, upon which the Chinese Imperium was once founded upon, that no more shall there be a vain reverence for the past, or excessively devotion to pointless rituals and rites, but instead, unto civil authorities rightly belongs present this-worldly good alone, through the direct coordination of empirical instruments, while the Gospel alone commands and establishes the hearts and souls of man with the love of Christ, mediated by the Word alone and not by concocted idolatrous rituals.

And now in the wake of the cleansing of China of its corrupt cultural elements, through both the Opium War and the Cultural Revolution, the Lord now reaps the fruits of Christian conversion in China where before there was nothing more than idolatrous resistance.