d Carlyle. When I
was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places
in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who
have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen
most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a
Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the
possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it."
When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less
formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the
women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to
dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest,
but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly
relation."

[Illustration: CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS]

[Illustration: MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.
p. 112]

"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the
morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the
shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very
things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the
lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his
teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of
change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let
men and women believe as they have light."

He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables
Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to
the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not
understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man
for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to
remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural
life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I
must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality."
Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense
is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the
part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had
been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of
Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not
possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from
Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to
obtain it from the sources at h