Sectarians adhere to the positions they at present occupy, so long must
any real unity of action be impossible; neither can peace be sought by
surrender or compromise of principle. But meanwhile there is, of course, a
lamentable want of compactness among the converts--as a recent writer in
the _Japan Mail_, remarked "they are more like scattered groups of
soldiers than an army";--while the perplexity occasioned to those we are
seeking to convince is terrible and great.

The following extract from Miss Bickersteth's recently-published _Japan as
we saw it_ (Sampson Low, 1893), draws an able contrast between the
religious condition of Japan at the present day and the position of
Christianity in the time of St. Francis Xavier. "It was impossible not to
be struck with the present complication of religious matters in the
country as compared with the days of Xavier. Then, on the one side, there
was the Buddhist-Shinto creed, undermined by no Western science, still
powerful in its attraction for the popular mind, and presenting a more or
less solid resistance to the foreign missionary; and, on the other,
Christianity as represented by Roman Catholicism, imperfect truly, but
without a rival in dogma or in ritual. Now the ranks of Buddhist-Shintoism
are hopelessly broken; the superstition of its votaries is exposed by the
strong light of modern science, and their enthusiasm too often quenched in
the deeper darkness of atheism. Christianity, though present in much
greater force than in the days of Xavier, is, alas, not proportionately
stronger. The divisions of Christendom are nowhere more evident than in
its foreign missions to an intellectual people like the Japanese. The
Greek, the Roman, the Anglican churches, the endless 'splits' of
Nonconformity, must and do present to the Japanese mind a bewildering
selection of possibilities in religious truth."

To refer to but one other hindrance to Christian progress in Japan--which,
although the last mentioned, is by no means the least serious--I mean the
estimate formed by the natives of the practical influence of the Christian
religion upon English people and upon other nations professing it.
Applying to Christianity the test of its results, they urge that it has,
at any rate, only very partially succeeded. For instance, the Japanese
comment upon the fact that numbers of Englishmen in Japan never attend the
services of their Church; and that the lives of many of them display a
flagr