al in Japan, because I do not regard it as a source of
danger to the community."[CA]

If leaders of national thought have such conceptions as to the nature
and origin of religion, is it strange that the rank and file of
educated people should have little regard for it, or that foreigners
generally should believe the Japanese race to be essentially
non-religious?

But before we accept this conclusion, various considerations demand
our notice. Although the conception of religion held by the eminent
Japanese gentlemen just quoted is not accepted by the writer as
correct, yet, even on their own definitions, a study of Japanese
superstitions and religious ceremonies would easily prove the people
as a whole to be exceedingly religious. Never had a nation so many
gods. It has been indeed "the country of the gods." Their temples and
shrines have been innumerable. Priests have abounded and worshipers
swarmed. For worship, however indiscriminate and thoughtless, is
evidence of religious nature.

Furthermore, utterances like those quoted above in regard to the
nature and function of religion, are frequently on the lips of
Westerners also, multitudes of whom have exceedingly shallow
conceptions of the real nature of religion or the part it plays in the
development of society and of the individual. But we do not pronounce
the West irreligious because of such utterances. We must not judge the
religious many by the irreligious few.

Again, are they competent judges who say the Japanese are
non-religious? Can a man who scorns religion himself, who at least
reveals no appreciation of its real nature by his own heart
experience, judge fairly of the religious nature of the people? Still
further, the religious phenomena of a people may change from age to
age. In asking, then, whether a people is religious by nature, we must
study its entire religious history, and not merely a single period of
it. The life of modern Japan has been rudely shocked by the sudden
accession of much new intellectual light. The contents of religion
depends on the intellect; sudden and widespread accession of knowledge
always discredits the older forms of religious expression. An
undeveloped religion, still bound up with polytheistic symbolism, with
its charms and mementoes, inevitably suffers severely at the hands of
exact modern science. For the educated minority, especially, the
inevitable reaction is to complete skepticism, to apparent irreligion.
For the