United States or Bangladesh ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Such official interference would seem to us tyrannical: it is simply paternal, and represents the continuance of an ancient regulation intended to protect the bereaved against what Eastern faith still deems the supreme misfortune, the extinction of the home-cult.... In other respects the later codes allow of individual liberty unknown in previous generations.
It is a religion rather of gratitude and tenderness; the dead being served by the household as if they were actually present in the body .... I fancy that if we were able to enter for a moment into the vanished life of some old Greek city, we should find the domestic religion there not less cheerful than the Japanese home-cult remains to-day.
Besides, the daughters of the family, being destined, as a general rule, to marry into other households, could bear only a temporary relation to the home-cult. It was necessary that the religion of the wife should be the religion of the husband; and the Japanese, like the Greek woman, on marrying into another household, necessarily became attached to the cult of her husband's family.
Word Of The Day