He graduated summa cum laude from Bucknell University, in Pennsylvania in 1899, and quickly married Carrie Mae.
In 1900 when John R. Mott of the SVM spoke, he heard "The Call" again, and successfully applied to be appointed as a missionary for the Southern Baptist Convention.
Shortly after Christmas, Carrie Mae slipped on the ice, fractured her hip, and on January 7, 1917, died from a blood infection.
Frank's grief was compounded when the family Baptist church refused to allow a non-Baptist friend deliver the eulogy.
On the steamer from Shanghai, the family had struck up a friendship with Florence Lang, who was herself returning from Bombay, where she worked as General Secretary of the YWCA.
In addition to Confucius and Mozi he read modern Chinese scholars such as Liang Qichao and Hu Shih.
Physically and spiritually happy in his new marriage, he began to develop a more favorable understanding of Chinese religions, especially Buddhism.
[6] After World War I, the New Culture Movement advocated a scientific approach to politics and religion, and began to oppose foreign influence in China.
At the same time, an influential group of Protestant missionaries in China worked to build what the historian Daniel Bays calls a "Sino-foreign Protestant Establishment" which saw Chinese nationalism and Chinese Christianity as working together to build a modern and independent nation.
[4] President John Leighton Stuart of Yenching University offered Rawlinson a position teaching Christian apologetics in 1920, but it fell through because his Southern Baptist mission board declined to fund it.
The journal sought out articles by and about Chinese intellectuals and commissioned translations to present important thinking on politics and religion.
Cheng and other leaders aimed to develop a Chinese Christianity which was not based on independent denominations but on a unified church.
Kenneth Scott Latourette, the leading scholar of missions at the time, reflected a feeling shared among liberal missionaries such as Rawlinson that the Church had "become a partner in Western imperialism and could not well disavow some responsibility for the consequences."
In particular, he pointed out that it was "somewhat humiliating" to force China to grant permission for "Christian aliens" to build churches and propagate their religion under protection of extraterritoriality.
Rawlinson approved the egalitarian social aims which Chinese communists announced while condemning their violent methods.
Rawlinson's June 1934 editorial, "Beyond Communism," reminded readers that as doctrine Christianity was "adverse" to capitalism but in fact had accommodated to it easily enough.
"[21] On August 14, 1937, a Chinese fighter plane, damaged by anti-aircraft fire from a Japanese battleship in the river, accidentally dropped a bomb onto a crowded Shanghai street, killing over 1,500 people.