e agnostic
Japan is teaching us at this very hour how religions are sometimes
manufactured for a special end--to subserve practical worldly purposes.

Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new Japanese
religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated phenomenon. Every
manufacture presupposes a material out of which it is made, every
present a past on which it rests. But the twentieth-century Japanese
religion of loyalty and patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing
ideas have been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses,
and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new, it is
not yet completed; it is still in process of being consciously or
semi-consciously put together by the official class, in order to serve
the interests of that class, and, incidentally, the interests of the
nation at large. The Japanese bureaucracy is a body greatly to be
admired. It includes most of the foremost men of the nation. Like the
priesthood in later Judaea, to some extent like the Egyptian and Indian
priesthoods, it not only governs, but aspires to lead in intellectual
matters. It has before it a complex task. On the one hand, it must make
good to the outer world the new claim that Japan differs in no essential
way from the nations of the West, unless, indeed, it be by way of
superiority. On the other hand, it has to manage restive steeds at home,
where ancestral ideas and habits clash with new dangers arising from an
alien material civilisation hastily absorbed.

Down to the year 1888, the line of cleavage between governors and
governed was obscured by the joyful ardour with which all classes alike
devoted themselves to the acquisition of European, not to say American,
ideas. Everything foreign was then hailed as perfect--everything old and
national was contemned. Sentiment grew democratic, in so far (perhaps it
was not very far) as American democratic ideals were understood. Love
of country seemed likely to yield to a humble bowing down before foreign
models. Officialdom not unnaturally took fright at this abdication of
national individualism. Evidently something must be done to turn the
tide. Accordingly, patriotic sentiment was appealed to through the
throne, whose hoary antiquity had ever been a source of pride to
Japanese literati, who loved to dwell on the contrast between Japan's
unique line of absolute monarchs and the short-lived dynasties of China.
Shinto, a primitive nature cult,