life,--ideals and sanctions that command his assent and direct his
life,--he will drop back into a thoroughgoing atomic, individualistic,
selfish life, which can be only a hindrance to the higher development
both of society and of the individual. In order that men advancing in
intellectual ability may remain useful members of society, they must
remain subject to those ideals and sanctions which will actually
secure social conduct. While disregarding the chaff of primitive
religious superstitions and ceremonials man must retain the wheat; he
must feel the force of the religious spirit in a deeper and
profounder, because more personal way than did his ancestors.
Increasing intellectual power and knowledge must be balanced by
increasing individual experience of the religious motives and spirit.
This is the reason why each advancing age should study afresh the
whole religious problem, and state in the terms of its own experience
the prominent and permanent religious truths of all the ages and the
sanctions that flow from them. Hence it is that a religion only
traditional and ceremonial is quite unfitted for a developing life.

Japan is no exception to the general laws of human evolution. As her
intellectual abilities increase, the forms of her old religious life
will become increasingly unacceptable to the people at large. If, in
rejecting the obsolete forms of religious thought, she rejects
religion and its sanctions altogether, atomistic individualism can be
the only result, and with it wide moral corruption will eat out the
vitality of the national life.

That Christianity alone, of all the religions of the world, fulfills
the conditions will not need many words to prove. As a matter of fact
Christianity alone has succeeded in surviving the criticism of the
nineteenth century. In Christendom, all religions but Christianity
have perished. This is a mere matter of fact. As for the reason,
Christianity alone gives complete intellectually satisfactory
sanctions for both the communal and the individualistic principles of
social progress. Christianity, as we have sufficiently shown, has both
principles not unrelated to each other, but vitally interrelated. For
these reasons it is safe to maintain not only that Japan needs to find
a new religion, but that the religion must be Christianity in
substance, whatever be the name given it.

The Japanese have been described as essentially irreligious in nature.
We have seen how def