s apprehended by those alien to
them, but to fully appreciate the depth, extent, influence and tenacity
of these archaic, unwritten and unformulated beliefs requires residence
upon the soil and life among the devotees. Disowned it may be by the
priests and sages, indignantly disclaimed or secretly approved in part
by the organized religions, this great undergrowth of superstition is as
apparent as the silicious bamboo grass which everywhere conditions and
modifies Japanese agriculture. Such prevalence of mental and spiritual
disease is the sad fact that confronts every lover of his fellow-men.
This paganism is more ancient and universal than any one of the
religions founded on writing or teachers of name and fame. Even the
applied science and the wonderful inventions imported from the West, so
far from eradicating it, only serve as the iron-clad man-of-war in warm
salt water serves the barnacles, furnishing them food and hold.

We propose to give in this our first lecture, a general or bird's-eye
view of this dead level of paganism above which the systems of
Shint[=o], Confucianism and Buddhism tower like mountains. It in by this
omnipresent superstition that the respectable religious have been
conditioned in their history and are modified at present, even as
Christianity has been influenced in its progress by ethnic or local
ideas and temperaments, and will be yet in its course of victory in the
Mikado's empire.

Just as the terms "heathen" (happily no longer, in the Revised Version
of the English Bible) and "pagan" suggest the heath-man of Northern
Europe and the isolated hamlet of the Roman empire, while the cities
were illuminated with Christian truth, so, in the main, the matted
superstitious of Chinese Asia are more suggestive of distances from
books and centres of knowledge, though still sufficiently rooted in the
crowded cities.

One to whom the boundary line between the Creator and his world is
perfectly clear, one who knows the eternal difference between mind and
matter, one born amid the triumphs of science can but faintly realize
the mental condition of the millions of Japan to whom there is no
unifying thought of the Creator-Father. Faith in the unity of law is the
foundation of all science, but the average Asiatic has not this thought
or faith. Appalled at his own insignificance amid the sublime mysteries
and awful immensities of nature, the shadows of his own mind become to
him real existences. As it i