the gods' lives than a guide to
that road by which man himself may attain to immortality. Thus with a
certain fitness pilgrimages are its most noticeable rites. One cannot
journey anywhere in the heart of Japan without meeting multitudes of
these pilgrims, with their neat white leggings and their mushroom-like
hats, nor rest at night at any inn that is not hung with countless
little banners of the pilgrim associations, of which they all are
members. Being a pilgrim there is equivalent to being a tourist here,
only that to the excitement of doing the country is added a sustaining
sense of the meritoriousness of the deed. Oftener than not the objective
point of the devout is the summit of some noted mountain. For peaks
are peculiarly sacred spots in the Shinto faith. The fact is perhaps an
expression of man's instinctive desire to rise, as if the bodily act
in some wise betokened the mental action. The shrine in so exalted
a position is of the simplest: a rude hut, with or without the only
distinctive emblems of the cult, a mirror typical of the god and the
pendent gohei, or zigzag strips of paper, permanent votive offerings
of man. As for the belief itself, it is but the deification of those
natural elements which aboriginal man instinctively wonders at or fears,
the sun, the moon, the thunder, the lightning, and the wind; all, in
short, that he sees, hears, and feels, yet cannot comprehend. He clothes
his terrors with forms which resemble the human, because he can conceive
of nothing else that could cause the unexpected. But the awful shapes he
conjures up have naught in common with himself. They are far too fearful
to be followed. Their way is the "highway of the gods," but no Jacob's
ladder for wayward man.

In this externality to the human lies the reason that Shintoism and
Buddhism can agree so well, and can both join with Confucianism in
helping to form that happy family of faith which is so singular a
feature of Far Eastern religious capability. It is not simply that the
two contrive to live peaceably together; they are actually both of them
implicitly believed by the same individual. Millions of Japanese
are good Buddhists and good Shintoists at the same time. That such a
combination should be possible is due to the essential difference in the
character of the two beliefs. The one is extrinsic, the other intrinsic,
in its relations to the human soul. Shintoism tells man but little about
himself and his hereafter;