n. To the critical
student, however, who has lived among the people and the temples devoted
to this worship, who knows how innocent and how truly sincere and even
reverent and devout in the use of these symbols the worshippers are, the
matter is measurably clear. He can understand the soil, root and flower
even while the most strange specimen is abhorrent to his taste, and
while he is most active in destroying that mental climate in which such
worship, whether native or exotic, can exist and flourish.

In none of the instances in which I have been eyewitness of the cult, of
the person officiating or of the emblem, have I had any reason to doubt
the sincerity of the worshipper. I have never had reason to look upon
the implements or the system as anything else than the endeavor of man
to solve the mystery of Being and Power. In making use of these emblems,
the Japanese worshipper simply professes his faith in such solution as
has seemed to him attainable.

That this cultus was quite general in pre-Buddhistic Japan, as in many
other ancient countries, is certain from the proofs of language,
literature, external monuments and relics which are sufficiently
numerous. Its organic connection with the god-way may be clearly shown.

To go farther back in point of time than the "Kojiki," we find that even
before the development of art in very ancient Japan, the male gods were
represented by a symbol which thus became an image of the deity himself.
This token was usually made of stone, though often of wood, and in later
times of terra-cotta, of cast and wrought iron and even of gold.[12]

Under the direct influence of such a cult, other objects appealed to the
imagination or served the temporary purpose of the worshipper as
_ex-voto_ to hang up in the shrines, such as the mushroom, awabi,
various other shells and possibly the fire-drill. It is only in the
decay of the cultus, in the change of view and centre of thought
compelled by another religion, that representations of the old emblems
ally themselves with sensualism or immorality. It is that natural
degradation of one man's god into another man's devil, which conversion
must almost of necessity bring, that makes the once revered symbol
"obscene," and talk about it become, in a descending scale, dirty, foul,
filthy, nasty. That the Japanese suffer from the moral effluvia of a
decayed cult which was once as the very vertebral column of the national
body of religion, is evident