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Back to the Sun, indeed, like the Shintoist, we can trace our descent; yet we know that even there the beginning of us was not. Infinitely more remote in time than a million sun-lives was that beginning, if it can truly be said there was a beginning. The teaching of Evolution is that we are one with that unknown Ultimate, of which matter and human mind are but ever-changing manifestations.
When once the passage from the one system of thought to the other has been effected, and the significance of the Christian system and life has been appreciated, in other words, when the Japanese Buddhist or Shintoist or Confucianist has become a Christian, he is as truly a Christian and as faithful as is the Englishman or American.
Both of them are entirely absorbed in the practices of Shintoist devotion: perpetually on their knees before their family altar, perpetually occupied in murmuring their lengthy orisons to the Spirits, and clapping their hands from time to time to recall around them the inattentive essences floating in the atmosphere; in their spare moments they cultivate in little pots of gayly-painted earthenware, dwarf shrubs and unheard-of flowers which smell deliciously in the evening.
Both Shinto cults have their particular feast-days; and, in the case of the ancestor-cult, the feast-days are occasions of religious assembly, when the relatives of the family should gather to celebrate the domestic rite .... The Shintoist must also take part in the celebration of the festivals of the Ujigami, and must at least aid in the celebration of the nine great national holidays related to the national cult; these nine, out of a total eleven, being occasions of imperial ancestor-worship.
But he was first of all a Shintoist; and the third article of his code commands devotion to the Kami as the first of duties: "Keep your heart pure; and so long as your body shall exist, be diligent in paying honour and veneration to the Gods."
But I had not before heard of triplex and quadruplex and other yet more highly complex Souls; and I questioned Kinjuro vainly in the hope of learning the authority for his beliefs. They were the beliefs of his fathers: that was all he knew. Like most Izumo folk, Kinjuro was a Buddhist as well as a Shintoist. As the former he belonged to the Zen-shu, as the latter to the Izumo- Taisha.
There is even a little Shintoist altar, before which Madame Prune has not been able to restrain her feelings, and before which she has fallen down and chanted her prayers in her bleating, goat-like voice: "Wash me clean from all my impurity, O Ama-Terace-Omi-Kami! as one washes away uncleanness in the river of Kamo."
It is true that the Christian system is so opposed to the Buddhistic and Shinto, and in some respects to the Confucian, that it is an exceedingly difficult matter at the beginning to give the Buddhist or Shintoist any idea of what Christianity is.
At all events it is certain, from whatever cause, that the deepest depths and the loftiest heights of which this story-plot has been found capable, have been reached only under Christian influences. Pliny and Mohammed, the Taoist and the Shintoist, have recorded no tale that sways our emotions like those of Herla, the Aged Bride, and the Monk Felix.
Every day I wake to the sound of this Shintoist litany chanted beneath me, vibrating through the exquisite clearness of the summer mornings while our night-lamps burn low before the smiling Buddha, while the eternal sun, hardly risen, already sends through the cracks of our wooden panels its bright rays, which dart like golden arrows through our darkened dwelling and our blue gauze tent.
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