The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invention of a New Religion, by
Basil Hall Chamberlain

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Title: The Invention of a New Religion

Author: Basil Hall Chamberlain

Posting Date: December 22, 2008 [EBook #2510]
Release Date: February, 2001

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION ***

Produced by Peter Evans

THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION

By B. H. Chamberlain

EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE AND PHILOLOGY AT THE IMPERIAL UNIVERSITY
OF TOKYO, JAPAN 1912

Transcriber's Notes: A few diacritical marks have had to be removed,
but Chamberlain did not use macrons to represent lengthened vowels.
What were footnotes are numbered and moved to the end of the relevant
paragraphs.

THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION (1)

(Note 1) The writer of this pamphlet could but
skim over a wide subject. For full information see
Volume I. of Mr. J. Murdoch's recently-published
"History of Japan," the only critical work on that
subject existing in the English language.

Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who held
religions to be the invention of priests, have been scorned as
superficial by later investigators. But was there not something in their
view, after all? Have not we, of a later and more critical day, got into
so inveterate a habit of digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what
lies before our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example.
The Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an irreligious people.
They say so themselves. Writes one of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa,
teacher and type of the modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a
religious nature, and have never believed in any religion." A score of
like pronouncements might be quoted from other leading men. The average,
even educated, European strikes the average educated Japanese as
strangely superstitious, unaccountably occupied with supra-mundane
matters. The Japanese simply cannot be brought to comprehend how a "mere
parson" such as the Pope, or even the Archbishop of Canterbury, occupies
the place he does in politics and society. Yet this sam