time being, religion itself may appear to have been
discredited. In an advancing age, prophets of religious dissolution
are abundant. Such prophecies, with reference to Christianity, have
been frequent, and are not unheard even now. Particular beliefs and
practices of religion have indeed changed and passed away, even in
Christianity. But the essentially religious nature of man has
re-asserted itself in every case, and the outward expressions of that
nature have thereby only become freer from elements of error and
superstition. Exactly this is taking place in Japan to-day. The
apparent irreligion of to-day is the groundwork of the purer religion
of to-morrow.

If the Japanese are emotional and sentimental, we should expect them
to be, perhaps more than most peoples, religious. This expectation is
not disappointed by a study of their history. However imperfect as a
religion we must pronounce original Shinto to have been, consisting of
little more than a cultus and a theogony, yet even with this alone the
Japanese should be pronounced a religious people. The universality of
the respect and adoration, not to say love, bestowed throughout the
ages of history on the "Kami" (the multitudinous Gods of Shintoism),
is a standing witness to the depth of the religious feeling in the
Japanese heart. True, it is associated with the sentiments of love of
ancestors and country, with filial piety and loyalty; but these, so
far from lowering the religion, make it more truly religious?

Unending lines of pilgrims, visiting noted Shinto temples and climbing
sacred mountain peaks, arrest the attention of every thoughtful
student of Japan. These pilgrims are numbered by the hundreds of
thousands every year. The visitors to the great shrine at Kizuki of
Izumo number about 250,000 annually. "The more prosperous the season,
the larger the number of pilgrims. It rarely falls below two hundred
thousand." In his "Occult Japan," Mr. Lowell has given us an
interesting account of the "pilgrim clubs," The largest known to him
numbered about twelve thousand men, but he thinks they average from
one hundred to about five hundred persons each. The number of yearly
visitors to the Shinto shrines at Ise is estimated at half a million,
and ten thousand pilgrims climb Mt. Fuji every summer. The number of
pilgrims to Kompira, in Shikoku, is incredibly large; according to the
count taken during the first half of 1898, the first ever taken, the
average for s