of its undoing grew out of
the first. The scholarship which led the patriots against the usurper
in political life led them also against all foreign innovations such
as Buddhism and Confucianism, which they scorned as modern and
anti-imperial. The Shinto cultus thus received a powerful revival.
With the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868 Confucianism naturally
went with it, and for a time Shinto was the state religion. But its
poverty in every line, except the communal sanctions, caused it in a
short time to lose its place.

The two causes just assigned for the fall of Bushido, however, could
hardly have wrought its ruin had it been more than a utilitarian and
agnostic system of morality, calculated to maintain the social
ascendency of a small fraction of the nation. As a religion, Bushido
would have secured a conservative power enabling it to survive, by
adapting itself to a changed social order. As it was, Bushido was
snuffed out by a single breath of the breeze that began to blow from
foreign lands. As an ethical system it has conferred a blessing on
Japan that should never be forgotten. But its identification with a
class and a clan social order rendered it too narrow for the national
and international life into which the nation was forced by
circumstances beyond its control, and its agnostic utilitarianism did
not provide it with sufficient moral power to cope with the problems
of the new individualistic age that had suddenly burst upon it. In all
Japan there remains to the present day only one of those old
Confucian schools with its temple to Confucius. All the rest have
fallen into ruins or have been used for other purposes, while the
gold-covered statues of the once deified teacher have been sold to
curio-dealers or for their bullion value. In the worship of Confucius,
Bushido almost became a religion, but it worshiped the teacher instead
of the Creator, maintaining its agnosticism as to the Creator, as to
"Heaven," to the end, and thus lapsed from the path of religious
evolution.

This brings us down to modern times--into the seventies. Already in
the sixties Japan had discovered herself in a totally new environment.
She found that foreign nations had made great progress in every
direction since she shut them out two hundred and fifty years before.
She discovered her helplessness, she discovered, too, that the social
order of Western peoples was totally distinct from hers. These
discoveries served to break d