eemed singularly deficient in this grace. It is my
impression that relatively few of the scores of students who have
received a large proportion of their expenses from the mission, while
pursuing their studies, have felt that they were thereby under any
special debt of gratitude. An experience that a missionary had with a
class to which he had been teaching the Bible in English for about a
year is illustrative. At the close of the school year they invited him
to a dinner where they made some very pleasant speeches, and bade each
other farewell for the summer. The teacher was much gratified with the
result of the year's work, feeling naturally that these boys were his
firm friends. But the following September when he returned, not only
did the class not care to resume their studies with him, but they
appeared to desire to have nothing whatever to do with him. On the
street many of them would not even recognize him. Other similar cases
come to mind, and it should be remembered that missionaries give such
instruction freely and always at the request of the recipient. In the
case cited the teacher came to the conclusion that the elaborate
dinner and fine farewell speeches were considered by the young men as
a full discharge of all debts of gratitude and a full compensation for
services. This, however, is to be said: the city itself was at that
time the seat of a determined antagonism to Christianity and, of
course, to the Christian missionary; and this fact may in part, but
not wholly, account for the appearance of ingratitude.

The Japanese pride themselves on their gratitude. It is, however,
limited in its scope. It is vigorous toward the dead and toward the
Emperor, but as a grace of daily life it is not conspicuous.

Few achievements of the Japanese have been more remarkable than the
suppression of certain religious phenomena. Any complete statement of
the religious characteristics of the Japanese fifty years ago would
have included most revolting and immoral practices under the guise of
religion. Until suppressed by the government in the early years of
Meiji there were in many parts of Japan phallic shrines of
considerable popularity, at which, on festivals at least, sexual
immorality seemed to be an essential part of the worship. At Uji, not
far from Kyoto, the capital of the Empire, for a thousand years and
more, and the center of Buddhism, there was a shrine of great repute
and popularity. Thither resorted the mult