more," he added gravely. "Before you can get deeply into
your subject you must touch religion. There you see the depths of the
people. A large part of the deterioration of the countryside is due to
the deterioration of Buddhism. You must ask about it. You will see in
the villages much of what your old writers used to call 'priestcraft.'
You will hear of the thraldom of many of the people. You will see with
your own eyes that real Christianity may be a moral bath for a rural
district."

"The essentials, not the forms of Christianity," he declared, would
save the countryside by "brotherly union." "Brotherly union" would
make a better life and a better agriculture. The rural class, he
explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into
owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[105].
The division between the two classes was "as great as an Indian caste
division." "To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal
lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work,
comes as an intellectual revolution." Women as well as men of means
received from Christianity "a new conception of humanity." They ceased
to "look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of
poor people." They changed their way of speaking to the peasants. They
developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the
spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of
their village.

I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura. We stayed at
the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents. I found myself
in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building
on a beam which yearly bore a nest. In this room stood a shrine
containing the ancestral tablets. The daily offerings were no longer
made, but Uchimura's counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to
preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the
courtyard. Near by was an engraving of Luther.

[Illustration: "THE JAPANESE CARLYLE." p. 90]

[Illustration: MR. AND MRS. YANAGI. p. 98]

Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the
district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live
Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which
was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of
Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain
cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy an