The Spiritual By-Plays That Make Life Bearable

Whilst browsing, I came across this passage from a book by Lin Yutang, My Country and My People. It is apparently very hard to find online. It contains the following reflection on Confucianism as compared to Christianity:

This realism and attached-to-the-earth quality of the Chinese ideal of life
has a basis in Confucianism, which, unlike Christianity, is of the earth,
earth-born. For Jesus was a romanticist, Confucius a realist; Jesus was a
mystic, Confucius a positivist; Jesus was a humanitarian, Confucius a humanist.
In these two personalities we see typified the contrast between Hebrew religion
and poetry and Chinese realism and common sense. Confucianism, strictly
speaking, was not a religion: it had certain feelings toward life and the
universe that bordered on the religious feeling, but it was not a religion.
There are such great souls in the world who cannot get interested in the life
hereafter or in the question of immortality, or in the world of spirits in
general. That type of philosophy could never satisfy the Germanic races, and
certainly not the Hebrews, but it satisfied the Chinese race—in general. We
shall see below how it really never quite satisfied even the Chinese, and how
that deficiency was made up for by a Taoist or Buddhist supernaturalism. But
this supernaturalism seems in China to be separated in general from the question
of the ideal of life: it represents rather the spiritual by-plays and outlets
that merely help to make life endurable.