[153] A large portion of this chapter is reprinted, by permission, from “The Standard,” Chicago.
[154] “Shintō signifies character in the highest sense,—courage, courtesy, honor, and, above all things, loyalty. The spirit of Shintō is the spirit of filial piety [Lat. pietas], the zest of duty, the readiness to surrender life for a principle.... It is the docility of the child; it is the sweetness of the Japanese woman.... It is religion—but religion transmuted into hereditary moral impulse—religion transmuted into ethical instinct. It is the whole emotional life of the race,—the Soul of Japan.”—Hearn.
[155] “Shintō is the Japanese conception of the cosmos. It is a combination of the worship of nature and of their own ancestors.... To the Japanese eye, the universe itself took on the paternal look. Awe of their parents, which these people could comprehend, lent explanation to dread of nature, which they could not. Quite cogently, to their minds, the thunder and the typhoon, the sunshine and the earthquake, were the work not only of anthropomorphic beings, but of beings ancestrally related to themselves. In short, Shintō ... is simply the patriarchal principle projected without perspective into the past, dilating with distance into deity.”
“Shintō is so Japanese it will not down. It is the faith of these people’s birthright, not of their adoption. Its folk-lore is what they learned at the knee of the race-mother, not what they were taught from abroad. Buddhist they are by virtue of belief; Shintō by virtue of being.”—Lowell, “The Soul of the Far East.”
[156] The earliest sacred book. The ancient records.
[157] See Transactions Asiatic Society of Japan, vols. xiv. and xvii., papers on “Shinshiu” by Troup.
[158] “Things Japanese.”
[159] “The Religions of Japan.”
[160] “Emotionally its tenets do not at bottom satisfy us Occidentals, flirt with them as we may. Passivity is not our passion, preach it as we are prone to do each to his neighbor. Scientifically, pessimism is foolishness, and impersonality a stage in development from which we are emerging, not one into which we shall ever relapse. As a dogma it is unfortunate, doing its devotee in the deeper sense no good, but it becomes positively faulty when it leads to practical ignoring of the mine and thine, and does other people harm.”—Lowell.
[161] See papers in vol. xxix., Transactions Asiatic Society of Japan, by Lloyd and Greene.