June 25, Chiang Kai-shek, the Achilles of the Nationalist army, is to return to the front and his first duty is the Homeric one of offering worship at the tomb of the dead leader of the revolution In. Poking. This homage is not religious act in the sense in which Occidentals regard religion, There is no suggestion that the soul of Dr. Sun Yat-sen has undergone an apotheosis or that he is conscious in the other world of the honour paid to him in this, The ceremony is copied from the Soviet practice of pay: ing quasi divine honour to the dead Lenin whose body, embalmed: in a_erystal coffin, is on: public view in Moscow. No one would suspect the Russian government of believing that there is any supernatural efficacy im the ceremony, but they are wise in their day and generation, 'They know that man is an incurably religious being and the religious sense is more deeply Jngrained in the Russian than in any' western people, Human nature is such that a man must find an outlet for his instinct to worship. If nothing better appears he will worship a golden calf or make a jumbo-jumbo out ofa stick or a stone. He is like a child playing with a block of wood and calling it a locomotive or a girl with a bundle of rags which she hugs and kisses aa baby. Psychologists clearly recognize this religious impulse Wut are by no means lucid in their explanations of its origin or what purpose it serves in the economy of nature. It probably Kas its root in primitive man's sense of his own littleness in the presence of the stupendous forces he sees in the storm and the earthquake that shake his little world to its foundations. These forces are very real and very terrible; he trembles and, in his fear, seeks to propitiate them. Even the cultivated Greeks, scoffers and cynics though they were, built their altars to. the unknown gods in the hope of enlisting their aid against the unseen terrors. Science has largely dissipated the superstitions that gave rise to the primal motive but the Impulse remains and, reason with himself as he will, the man who has no belief ina power Weyond himself that makes for righteousness is like a cripple without a crutch; he walks Bravely the path he has chosen but he walks limping.
Yat-sen is not, then, a religious but a political ceremony. It is designed to buttress the principles of Nationalism with a semi-divine sanction and, if we may say so without offence, it is ike ekeing out the lion's. skin with the fox's. From the standpoint of mere policy it ray have something to commend it mn yet, even as policy, it has dangers. The religious impulse is, as we have seen, both strong ind universal. It will grasp at straw if nothing more tangible placed within its reach. But [just because there is lurking in the mind of the worshipper the suspicion that he is merely playing a part, he the more strongly seeks to persuade himself into believing in the reality of the object of his adoration. Convince the savage that his totem merely a painted stick and wild horses will not drag him to its worship. He is extremely uncomfortable when he is deprived of his toy but, though with. all his heart he wishes it were possible, he cannot bow down to the thing he knows to be nonexistent, The question therefore arises, will the reputation of. Dr. Sun endure the fierce light that beats upon it when the multitude is asked to bow down and worship him as a demi-god? Confucius was worshipped in every city in China for two. thousand years but he has been deposed from his throne—why? Not because the religion he taught was bad, for he did not' teach religion. He taught statecraft, and his ideal state was an autocracy with a saint for' king. But the only saint kings [China ever had were mythological ones; the historical kings "belonged to a diametrically opposite order. Confucius had no idea of republican democracy fand the tide of modern thought. has swept him with his dream kings into the limbo of forgotten. things, Will the "Three Principles" last as long as the four books and the five classics? We may well well doubt it as we doubt that the mausoleum of Dr.
Sun will eclipse the Temple of. Heaven in Peking, though that, is rapidly falling into ruin.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.