SOURCE: Yutang, Lin. “Lin Yutang.” In Famous Conversions: The Christian Experience, edited by Hugh T. Kerr and John M. Mulder, pp. 205-09. Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 1983.

[In the following essay, Lin discusses his views on religion and why he came back to Christianity.]

Many people have asked me, some with great joy, some with great disappointment, why I, a self-declared pagan, have returned to Christianity. I have returned to Christianity and have rejoined the Christian church because I wish to re-enter that knowledge of God and love of God which Jesus revealed with such clarity and simplicity.

The question of paramount importance is, Can man survive without religion? For over thirty years, my only religion was humanism or the Confucian concept of the self-perfectibility of man through education—the belief that humanity is sufficient unto itself. I now believe that mankind cannot survive without religion; that humanity is not, and never has been, sufficient unto itself; that, for man's very survival, a religion of self-perfectibility is not religion enough. Man needs contact with a Power outside himself that is greater than himself. I believe that Christianity, because of what Christ revealed, offers man incomparably the best way to God. I have also been compelled to conclude that, as irreligion and materialism advance, the spirit of man decays and weakens, for I have witnessed the doings of a nation living without God.

A few words about my background are necessary. I was a third-generation Chinese Christian. My father was a Presbyterian minister in an inland village far back in the mountains from the port of Amoy on China's southeast coast. The valley where I lived, Paoa, was so completely closed in by mountains that it was called a “lake.” I had a wonderful childhood, near to God and his greatness, filled with the beauty of the clouds on the jagged peaks, the gray-blue tints on the pastures at sunset, the sound of a brook's laughter. These memories have a close relation to my religion. They made me hate what is artificial and complicated and small.

In my childhood family life we had simplicity and love. We children were not supposed to quarrel, and we didn't. The quest for learning was implicit in our home. It was fantastic, but in that inland village of the early nineteen hundreds, when the Empress Dowager was still ruling China, my father talked to us of the Universities of Berlin and Oxford and, half jokingly, half seriously, expressed the hope that I might study there. We were a family of dreamers.

One incident influenced my life deeply. My second sister, gifted and good, wanted to go to college. But education in China in those days was for sons, seldom for daughters. My father could not afford to educate both. Instead, at twenty-one, she married, for Chinese girls were not supposed to reach that age and not be married. We came down on the same river boat—she for her wedding, I to go to Shanghai for my first year of college. After her wedding she took forty Chinese pennies from the pocket of her bridal dress and gave them to me and said, with tears in her eyes:

“You have your chance to go to college. Being a girl, your sister can't. Do not waste your opportunity. Make up your mind to be a good man, a useful man, and a famous man.”

Two years later, she died of bubonic plague. The forty pennies were soon spent. Her words have remained with me.

In college in Shanghai, I studied for the ministry by my own choice. Then, what seemed to me the theological hocus-pocus discouraged me. As a matter of intellectual honesty, I dropped my intention of becoming a minister. While still believing in God, I turned from the church.

But other forces were at work to turn me toward paganism. After college I went to teach in Peking. Like many graduates of mission schools I was backward in Chinese. I had scant acquaintance with Chinese folklore because, as a Christian, I was not supposed to listen to the songs of street minstrels. When we passed a theatrical performance in the square, we were supposed to look straight ahead and not loiter. In my childhood I had known how Joshua's trumpets blew down the walls of Jericho, but no one had told me how the tears of Chi-Liang's widow had melted down and washed away a section of the Great Wall of China. Coming into contact with an authentic Chinese society and the glories of Peking, I burned with shame at my ignorance and plunged into the study of Chinese literature and philosophy.

But the break was not easy for one brought up in a deeply religious home. I feared the leap from a God-sheltered world into stark paganism. Then one of my colleagues, a modern-educated man, made an appeal to me on the basis of the Confucian ideal of human dignity: “We should be good men because we are human beings.” Confucius, I found, had bred men who dared death in order to do right. Mencius had said: “I love life, but I also love righteousness. If I cannot have both, I would sacrifice life to do what is right.”

This was humanism: the belief in human reason and in man's power, lifting himself by his own bootstraps, to better himself and make a better world. Such was the doctrine—inspired, in part, by Confucius—of the 18th century rationalists: Voltaire, Diderot, Leibnitz. Theirs was called the Age of Enlightenment.

That doctrine appealed to me for many years as sufficient. Then below the surface of my life a disquiet, born of both reflection and experience, began to set in. I saw that the fruit of the humanistic age of enlightenment was an age of materialism. Man's increasing belief in himself as God did not seem to be making him more godlike. He was becoming more clever. But he had less and less of the sober, uplifting humility of one who has stood in the presence of God. Much of contemporary history seemed to me to indicate how dangerously near the savage state that man, lacking that humility, may be even while he is most advanced materially and technologically.

As the satisfactions of humanism declined, I increasingly asked myself: Is there a satisfying religion for the modern, educated man?

Like humanism, Confucianism, for all the high morality of its teachings, was not good enough simply because man on his own had so often and so disastrously shown he was not that good. Buddhism, though a religion of mercy, is based on the philosophy that all this sensuous world is only an illusion. The best the Buddhist has to say to humans and the most he has to offer to the world is, “The pity of it all.” The teachings of Taoism come very near to the Sermon on the Mount. But the back-to-nature and beware-of-progress appeal inherent in Taoism is neither congenial to the modern soul nor helpful in solving man's modern problems.

Perhaps in this period the faith of my childhood was subconsciously reviving. Wherever we traveled during these years my wife always went to church. Sometimes I accompanied her. More often than not I came away discouraged rather than inspired. I could not stand a second-rate sermon. I squirmed in my seat at the rantings I heard about sin, hellfire, and brimstone. I would resolve not to go again.

Then one Sunday in New York City my wife again asked me to accompany her to church. She took care to point out that though I might or might not agree with the content of the sermon, I was certain to be impressed by its literary quality and the eloquence of the preacher. I was then at the crossroads, and I went. The church to which she took me was the Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church; the minister, Dr. David Read.

I did like the beauty of Dr. Read's English and his delivery, but that was not the point. His subject that morning was eternal life. I was more than curious as to what he would say. A heaven where we go on and on spending eternity praising God, where we do not falter or thirst or hunger from morning to night, day after day, had no attraction for me. The pearly gates were to me like a pawnbroker's dream. Many people who never set foot inside Tiffany's in this life hoped to do so in the next.

“What is eternal life?” asked the minister. It is certainly more, he said, than just going on living. It is more than continuance of life on the animal level of food, sleep, and reproduction; more than life on the secular level—the level on which we make our living, pay our debts, send our children to school.

There is, however, a higher level where man has a yearning for spiritual values and can be moved to unselfish sacrifice. That higher life concerned with spiritual values and conscious of the mysteries of the moral law within and the starry heavens above is the “life plus.” That life deserves eternity, and on that level eternity will be eternally satisfying.

I returned again and again to that church. I returned also to a study of the awe-inspiring simplicity and beauty of the teachings of Jesus. The scales began to fall from my eyes.

I found—as though I had never read of him before—that no one ever spoke like Jesus. He spoke of God the Father as one who knew him and was identified with him in the fullness of knowledge and love. No other teacher of men revealed such personal knowledge or such a sense of personal identity with God. The result was his astounding claim: “He that hath seen me hath seen the Father.”

It was astounding, too, that God, as Jesus revealed him, is so different from what men had thought him to be. There is a totally new order of love and compassion in Jesus' prayer from the cross, “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do.” That voice, unknown in history before, reveals God as forgiving, not in theory, but visibly forgiving as revealed in Christ. No other teacher said with such meaning, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.” The “me” in this context is God sitting on the Day of Judgment with a first concern for the downtrodden poor, the humble widow, the crippled orphan. There, I said to myself, Jesus speaks as the Teacher who is Master over both life and death. In him, this message of love and gentleness and compassion becomes incarnate. That, I saw, is why men have turned to him, not merely in respect but in adoration. That is why the light which blinded St. Paul on the road to Damascus with such a sudden impact continues to shine unobscured and unobscurably through the centuries.

I know, of course, that the teaching that God is Love and the consequent compulsion to make ours a better world must be derided and scoffed at by the materialists of our generation who believe that the world is only a whirl of blind atoms obeying blind mechanical laws. Such a gospel, too, must be despised and feared by the Marxists who preach hatred and violence. I do not know of anything, certainly not humanism, which will deter man from hatred and violence and cunning and deceit except these very opposite teachings and assumptions and compulsions of Christianity. In order to achieve a materially successful godless society, the Communists must first destroy man's fear of God. A good Christian makes a poor Communist and vice versa. The conflict between a godless society and one in which God is allowed room in the hearts of men is instinctive and elemental.

I no longer ask, “Is there a satisfying religion for the modern educated man?” I know there is. Returning to the Bible, I have found in it not merely a record of historical events but an authentic revelation that brings God, through Christ, within my reach. I have returned to the church. I am happy in my accustomed pew on Sunday morning. I believe we go to church not because we are sinners, and not because we are paragons of Christian virtue, but because we are conscious of our spiritual heritage, aware of our higher nature and equally conscious of our human failings and of the slough of self-complacency into which, without help from this greater power outside ourselves, we so easily fall back.

He who would reach out to see the incomparable beauty and soulcharging power of the teachings of Christ must often struggle against the “religious” claptrap that tends to obscure it. But it was Jesus himself who simplified for us the essence of Christianity and its adequacy above any other faith: Upon the two commandments, to love God and to love one's neighbor, “hang all the law and the prophets.” That Person and that Gospel I have found sufficient—a sufficiency which is joyously renewed each day. Nothing less than that Person and Gospel can be sufficient for the world.

Looking back on my life, I know that for thirty years I lived in this world like an orphan. I am an orphan no longer. Where I had been drifting, I have arrived. The Sunday morning when I rejoined the Christian church was a homecoming.