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And there is reason to believe that the early forms of Shinto public worship may have been evolved out of a yet older family worship much after the manner in which M. Fustel de Coulanges, in his wonderful book, La Cite Antique, has shown the religious public institutions among the Greeks and Romans to have been developed from the religion of the hearth.
The family being founded upon ancestor-worship, the commune being regulated by ancestor-worship, the clan-group or tribe being governed by ancestor-worship, and the Supreme Ruler being at once the high-priest and deity of an ancestral cult which united all the other cults in one common tradition, it must be evident that the promulgation of any religion essentially opposed to Shinto would have signified nothing less than an attack upon the whole system of society.
Now the young Japanese are a very home-loving folk, and even if they were not, almost all Shinto parents, realizing the paramount importance of having descendants to worship their spirits, favor and arrange early marriages for their sons.
What shall be the outcome? Upon nothing else, it seems to me, depends so much as upon the religious foundation upon which Japan seeks to build the structure of her newer and richer life. Many of her people, if I may change the figure, are seeking to put the new wine of Christian civilization into the old bottles of Shinto and Buddhist ritualism. That this must fail is, I think, self-evident.
To assert that the Shinto revival signified no more than a stroke of policy imagined by a group of statesmen, is to ignore all the antecedents of the event.
It was the shades of our ancestors, nothing more or less what would Uncle John have thought, or what would Aunt Anna think? It was never what would your own soul think was it now? It was pure Shinto. Our god-shelf bore the family-portraits." "A jolly good worship, too. You can't do anything very far wrong if you never disgrace the honour of your ancestors.
It may be placed to face south or east, but should not face west, and under no possible circumstances should it be suffered to face north or north-west. One explanation of this is the influence upon Shinto of Chinese philosophy, according to which there is some fancied relation between South or East and the Male Principle, and between West or North and the Female Principle.
No attempt has been made either in ancient or modern times to square this Shinto world-view with advancing knowledge of the world, particularly with the modern scientific conception of the universe. Anthropology, ethnology, and the doctrine of evolution both cosmic and human, are all destructive of the primitive Shinto world-view.
1 This was written early in 1892 2 Quoted from Mr. Satow's masterly essay, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto, published in the Transactions of the Asiatic Society of Japan. By 'gods' are not necessarily meant beneficent Kami. Shinto has no devils; but it has its 'bad gods' as well as good deities. 3 Satow, 'The Revival of Pure Shinto. 4 Ibid. 5 In the sense of Moral Path, i.e. an ethical system.
And the early Shinto teaching, that no code of ethics is necessary, that the right rule of human conduct can always be known by consulting the heart, is a teaching which will doubtless be accepted by a more perfect humanity than that of the present. "Evolution" the reader may say, "does indeed show through its doctrine of heredity that the living are in one sense really controlled by the dead.
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