ld, a veteran missionary in Africa, in the
concluding chapter of his very able work on "Religion and Myth," says:

The Church that first adopts for her intending missionaries the
study of Comparative Religion as a substitute for subjects now
taught will lead the van in the path of true progress.

The People of Japan.

In this faith then, in the spirit of Him who said, "I come not to
destroy but to fulfil," let us cast our eyes upon that part of the world
where lies the empire of Japan with its forty-one millions of souls.
Here we have not a country like India--a vast conglomeration of nations,
languages and religions occupying a peninsula itself like a continent,
whose history consists of a stratification of many civilizations. Nor
have we here a seemingly inert mass of humanity in a political structure
blending democracy and imperialism, as in China, so great in age, area
and numbers as to weary the imagination that strives to grasp the
details. On the contrary, in Dai Nippon, or Great Land of the Sun's
Origin, we have a little country easy of study. In geology it is one of
the youngest of lands. Its known history is comparatively modern. Its
area roughly reckoned as 150,000 square miles, is about that of our
Dakotas or of Great Britain and Ireland. The census completed December
31, 1892, illustrates here, as all over the world, nature's argument
against polygamy. It tells us that the relation between the sexes is,
numerically at least, normal. There were 20,752,366 males and 20,337,574
females, making a population of 41,089,940 souls. All these people are
subjects of the one emperor, and excepting fewer than twenty thousand
savages in the northern islands called Ainos, speak one language and
form substantially one race. Even the Riu Kiu islanders are Japanese in
language, customs and religion. In a word, except in minor differences
appreciable or at least important only to the special student, the
modern Japanese are a homogeneous people.

In origin and formation, this people is a composite of many tribes.
Roughly outlining the ethnology of Japan, we should say that the
aborigines were immigrants from the continent with Malay reinforcement
in the south, Koreans in the centre, and Ainos in the east and north,
with occasional strains of blood at different periods from various parts
of the Asian mainland. In brief, the Japanese are a very mixed race.
Authentic history before the Christian era is unknow