each day. Frequently the
preachers are itinerant priests, who go about the towns and villages
lecturing in the main hall of some temple or in the guest-room of the
resident priest.

There are many books of sermons published in Japan, all of which have
some merit and much quaintness: none that I have seen are, however, to
my taste, to be compared to the "Kiu-o Do-wa," of which the following
three sermons compose the first volume. They are written by a priest
belonging to the Shingaku sect--a sect professing to combine all that
is excellent in the Buddhist, Confucian, and Shin To teaching. It
maintains the original goodness of the human heart; and teaches that
we have only to follow the dictates of the conscience implanted in us
at our birth, in order to steer in the right path. The texts are
taken from the Chinese classical books, in the same way as our
preachers take theirs from the Bible. Jokes, stories which are
sometimes untranslatable into our more fastidious tongue, and pointed
applications to members of the congregation, enliven the discourses;
it being a principle with the Japanese preacher that it is not
necessary to bore his audience into virtue.

SERMON I

(THE SERMONS OF KIU-O, VOL. I)

Moshi[87] says, "Benevolence is the heart of man; righteousness is the
path of man. How lamentable a thing is it to leave the path and go
astray, to cast away the heart and not know where to seek for it!"

[Footnote 87: Moshi, the Japanese pronunciation of the name of the
Chinese philosopher Meng Tse, whom Europeans call Mencius.]

The text is taken from the first chapter of Koshi (the commentator),
on Moshi.

Now this quality, which we call benevolence, has been the subject of
commentaries by many teachers; but as these commentaries have been
difficult of comprehension, they are too hard to enter the ears of
women and children. It is of this benevolence that, using examples and
illustrations, I propose to treat.

A long time ago, there lived at Kioto a great physician, called
Imaoji--I forget his other name: he was a very famous man. Once upon a
time, a man from a place called Kuramaguchi advertised for sale a
medicine which he had compounded against the cholera, and got Imaoji
to write a puff for him. Imaoji, instead of calling the medicine in
the puff a specific against the cholera, misspelt the word cholera so
as to make it simpler. When the man who had employed him went and
taxed him with this, and ask