creed of educated China. Taoism, beginning, apparently, as
a spiritual system, did not appeal to the Chinese feeling, and speedily
degenerated into a system of magical jugglery. Thus the Chinese, with
the feeblest religious sense to be found in any great nation, have
nevertheless reached the grandiose conception of the all-embracing and
all-controlling supreme Heaven. In their case the governing
consideration has been the moral organization of social life, and Nature
has swallowed up all great partial deities.

+750+. _Japan._ Japan has produced no great god;[1298] out of the mass
of nature gods reported in the Kojiki not one becomes preeminent. There
is recognition of Heaven and Earth as the beginning of things, and of
the sun as a deity, but neither the sky-god nor the sun-goddess becomes
a truly high god. Japanese theistic development appears to have been
crippled at an early period by the intrusion of Chinese influences; the
very name of the national religion, Shinto, 'the Way of the Gods,' is
Chinese. The emperor was deified, and ancestor-worship became the
principal popular cult;[1299] but Confucianism and Buddhism overlaid the
native worship at an early period. The later forms of Shinto have moved
rather toward the rejection of the old deities than toward the creation
of a great national god.

+751+. _Semitic peoples._ Among the various Semitic peoples there is so
marked a unity of thought that, as Robertson Smith has pointed
out,[1300] we may speak of the Semitic religion, though there are
noteworthy local differences. Generally we find among these
communities, as elsewhere, a large number of local deities, scarcely
distinguishable in their functions one from another.[1301] A noteworthy
illustration of the long continuance of these local cults is given in
the attempt of the last king of Babylon, Nabonidus, to centralize the
worship by bringing the statues of the local deities to Babylon; the
result was a general popular protest. Similarly an attempt was made by
King Josiah in the seventh century B.C. to centralize all Israelite
worship in Jerusalem, but the history of the succeeding generations
shows that the attempt was not successful. The local gods represent the
clannic and tribal organization, to which the Semites appear to have
clung with peculiar fondness.

+752+. Semitic religion shows an orderly advance through the medium of
tribal and national feeling in conjunction with the regular moral and
intelle