erienced Christians a
full knowledge of these matters as it was for the latter to receive
such information. The primary interest of the missionaries was in the
practical and everyday duties of the Christian life, in the great
problem of getting men and women to put away the superstitions and
narrowness and sins springing from polytheism or practical atheism,
and getting them started in ways of godliness. The training schools
for evangelists were designed to raise up practical workers rather
than speculative theologians. Missionaries considered it their duty
(and they were beyond question right) to teach religion rather than
the science and philosophy of religion. When, therefore, the
evangelists discovered that they had not been taught these advanced
branches of knowledge, it is not strange that some should rush after
them, and, in their zeal for that which they supposed to be important,
hasten to criticise their former teachers. As a result, they
undermined both their own faith and that of many who had become
Christians through their teaching.

The dullness of the church life, so conspicuous at present in many of
the churches, is only partly due to the fact that the Christians are
tired of the services. It is true that these services no longer afford
them that mental and spiritual stimulus which they found at the first,
and that, lacking this, they find little inducement to attend. But
this is only a partial explanation. Looking over the experience of the
past twenty-five years, we now see that the intense zeal of the first
few years was a natural result of a certain narrowness of view. It is
an interesting fact that, during one of the early revivals in the
Doshisha, the young men were so intense and excited that the
missionaries were compelled to restrain them. These young Christians
felt and said that the missionaries were not filled with the Holy
Spirit; they accordingly considered it their duty to exhort their
foreign leaders, even to chide them for their lack of faith. The
extraordinary expectations entertained by the young Japanese workers
of those days and shared by the missionaries, that Japan was to
become a Christian nation before the end of the century, was due in
large measure to an ignorance alike of Christianity, of human nature,
and of heathenism, but, under the peculiar conditions of life, this
was well-nigh inevitable. And that great and sudden changes in feeling
and thought have come over the infant