the dumb animals are as speaking likenesses as their human fellows.

The other arts show the same motif in their decorations. Pottery
and lacquer alike witness the respective positions assigned to the

serious and the comic in Far Eastern feeling.
The Far Oriental makes fun of man and makes love to Nature; and it

almost seems as if Nature heard his silent prayer, and smiled upon
him in acceptance; as if the love-light lent her face the added

beauty that it lends the maid's. For nowhere in this world,
probably, is she lovelier than in Japan: a climate of long, happy

means and short extremes, months of spring and months of autumn,
with but a few weeks of winter in between; a land of flowers, where

the lotus and the cherry, the plum and wistaria, grow wantonly side
by side; a land where the bamboo embosoms the maple, where the pine

at last has found its palm-tree, and the tropic and the temperate
zones forget their separate identity in one long self-obliterating

kiss.
Chapter 7. Religion.

In regard to their religion, nations, like individuals, seem
singularly averse to practising what they have preached. Whether it

be that his self-constructed idols prove to the maker too suggestive
of his own intellectualchisel to deceive him for long, or whether

sacred soil, like less hallowed ground, becomes after a time
incapable of responding to repeated sowings of the same seed,

certain it is that in spiritual matters most peoples have grown out
of conceit with their own conceptions. An individual may cling with

a certain sentiment to the religion of his mother, but nations have
shown anything but a foolish fondness for the sacredsuperstitions

of their great-grandfathers. To the charm of creation succeeds
invariably the bitter-sweet after-taste of criticism, and man would

not be the progressive animal he is if he long remained in love with
his own productions.

What his future will be is too engrossing a subject, and one too
deeply shrouded in mystery, not to be constantly pictured anew.

No wonder that the consideration at that country toward which mankind
is ever being hastened should prove as absorbing to fancy as

contemplated earthly journeys proverbially are. Few people but have
laid out skeleton tours through its ideal regions, and perhaps,

as in the mapping beforehand of merely mundane travels, one element
of attraction has always consisted in the possible revision of one's

routes.
Besides, there is a fascination about the foreign merely because it

is such. Distance lends enchantment to the views of others, and
never more so than when those views are religious visions.

An enthusiast has certainly a greater chance of being taken for a
god among a people who do not know him intimately as a man. So with

his doctrines. The imported is apt to seem more important than the
home-made; as the far-off bewitches more easily than the near. But

just as castles in the air do not commonly become the property of
their builders, so mansions in the skies almost as frequently have

failed of direct inheritance. Rather strikingly has this proved the
case with what are to-day the two most powerful religions of the

world,--Buddhism and Christianity. Neither is now the belief of its
founder's people. What was Aryan-born has become Turanian-bred,

and what was Semitic by conception is at present Aryan by adoption.
The possibilities of another's hereafter look so much rosier than

the limitations of one's own present!
Few pastimes are more delightful than tossing pebbles into some

still, dark pool, and watching the ripples that rise responsive,
as they run in ever widening circles to the shore. Most of us have

felt its fascination second only to that of the dotted spiral of the
skipping-stone, a fascination not outgrown with years. There is

something singularly attractive in the subtle force that for a
moment sways each particle only to pass on to the next, a motion

mysterious in its immateriality. Some such pleasure must be theirs
who have thrown their thoughts into the hearts of men, and seen them

spread in waves of feeling, whose sphere time widens through the
world. For like the mobile water is the mind of man,--quick to

catch emotions, quick to transmit them. Of all waves of feeling,
this is not the least true of religious ones, that, starting from

their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but humanity in
common with those who professed them first. Like the ripples in the

pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again into
comparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremors

hordes of outer barbarians. In both of the great religions in
question this wave propagation has been most marked, only the

direction it took differed. Christianity went westward; Buddhism
travelled east. Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find

counterparts in Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually the
taught surpassed their teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem

and Benares at last gave place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal
centres. Still the movement journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas

remained where their predecessors had founded sees, but the tide of
belief surged past them in its irresistible advance. Farther yet

from where each faith began are to be found to-day the greater part
of its adherents. The home that the Western hemisphere seems to

promise to the one, the extreme Orient affords the other. As Roman
Catholicism now looks to America for its strength, so Buddhism

to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and Japan.
But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is

by no means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the
great Indian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a

system of superstition which has held its own to this day. In fact,
as the state religion of the land, it has just experienced a

revival, a regalvanizing of its old-timeenergy, at the hands of
some of the native archaeologists. Its sacred mirror, held up to

Nature, has been burnished anew. Formerly this body of belief was
the national faith, the Mikado, the direct descendant of the early

gods, being its head on earth. His reinstatement to temporal power
formed a very fitting first step toward reinvesting the cult with

its former prestige; a curious instance, indeed, of a religious
revival due to archaeological, not to religious zeal.

This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern
seaboard of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called

Shintoism. The word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods,"
and the letter of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the

belief. For its scriptures are rather an itinerary of the gods'
lives than a guide to that road by which man himself may attain to

immortality. Thus with a certain fitnesspilgrimages 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;
Buddhism, little but about himself and what he may become. In

examining Far Eastern religion, therefore, for personality, or the
reverse, we may dismiss Shintoism as having no particular bearing

upon the subject. The only effect it has is indirect in furthering