ts, something more than
teaching and ritual was necessary. It was indispensable that there
should be complete substitution, all along the ruts and paths of
national habit, and especially that the names of the gods and the
festivals should be Buddhaized.

Popular customs are nearly immortal and ineradicable. Though wars may
come, dynasties rise and fall, and convulsions in nature take place, yet
the people's manners and amusements are very slow in changing. If, in
the history of Christianity, the European missionaries found it
necessary in order to make conquest of our pagan forefathers, to baptize
and re-name without radically changing old notions and habits, so did it
seem equally indispensable that in Japan there should be some system of
reconciliation of the old and the new, some theological revolution,
which should either fulfil, absorb, or destroy Shint[=o].

In the histories of religions in Western Asia, Northern Africa and
Europe, we are familiar with efforts at syncretism. We have seen how
Philo attempted to unite Hebrew righteousness and Greek beauty, and to
harmonize Moses and Plato. We know of Euhemerus, who thought he read in
the old mythologies not only the outlines of real history, but the
hieroglyphics of legend and tradition, truth and revelation.[1] Students
of Church history are well aware that this principle of interpretation
was followed only too generously by Tertullian, Clement of Alexandria,
Lactantius, Chrysostom and others of the Church Fathers. Indeed, it
would be hard to find in any of the great religions of the world an
utter absence of syncretism, or the union of apparently hostile
religious ideas. In the Thousand and One Nights, we have an example in
popular literature. We see that the ancient men of India, Persia and
pre-Mohammedan Arabia now act and talk as orthodox Mussulmans. In
matters pertaining to art and furniture, the statue of Jupiter in Rome
serves for St. Peter, and in Japan that of the Virgin and child for the
Buddha and his mother.[2]

What, however, chiefly concerns the critic and student of religions is
to inquire how far the process has been natural, and the efforts of
those who have brought about the union have been honest, and their
motives pure. The Bible pages bear witness, that Israelites too often
tried to make the same fountain give forth sweet waters and bitter, and
to grow thistles and grapes on the same stem, by uniting the cults of
Jehovah and the Baalim. King