was not recognized. We thus discern how the religious
history of Japan was not a series of cataclysms or of disconnected
leaps in the dark, but an orderly development, one step naturally
following the next, as the sun follows the dawn. The different stages
of Japan's religious progress have received different names, because
due to specific stimuli brought from abroad; the religious life
itself, however, has been a continuous development.

Another difference between Shinto and Confucianism as it existed in
Japan should not escape our attention, namely, in regard to their
respective world-views. Shinto was confessedly a religion; it frankly
believed in gods, whom it worshiped and on whose help it relied.
Confucianism, or to use the Japanese name, Bushido, was confessedly
agnostic. It did not assume to understand the universe, as Buddhism
assumed. Nor did it admit the practical existence of gods or their
power in this world, as Shinto believed. It maintained that, "if only
the heart follows the way of truth, the gods will protect one even
though he does not pray." It laid stress on practical moralities,
regardless of their philosophical presumptions, into which it would
not probe. When pressed it would ascribe all to "Heaven," and, as we
have seen, it had many implications that would lead the inquiring mind
to a belief in the personal nature of "Heaven." Had it developed these
implications, Bushido would have become a genuine religion. It was
indeed a system of ethics touched with emotion, it was religious, but
it failed to become the religion it might have become because it
insisted on its agnosticism and refused to worship the highest and
best it knew.

It is interesting to observe that the ideals and sanctions of
Confucianism produced effects which proved its ruin. They did this in
two ways; first, by developing the prolonged peace necessary for a
high grade of scholarship which, turning its attention to ancient
history, discovered that the Shogunate was assuming powers not in
accord with the primitive practice nor in accord with the theory of
the divine descent of the Imperial house. Imperialistic patriots
arose, whose aim was to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the
Emperor. They felt that, doing this, they were right; that is to say,
they became inspired by the Shinto sanctions for a national life. They
thus discovered the defect of the disjointed feudal system sanctioned
by feudal Confucianism. The second cause