MR. AND MRS. YANAGI.
Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more "people of the district who had accepted Christianity." His appeal was to "live Christianity as given to the world by its founder." The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher's copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle. When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front. "The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us," Uchimura told me afterwards, "is seen most in their treatment of women. Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it." When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk. Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation "to indicate the brotherly relation."
CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS
MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN.
"So you see," said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the morning, "in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very things they aim at." He went on to explain that he looked "in the lives of hearers, not in what they say," for results from his teaching. He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would. "Let men and women believe as they have light."
He spoke in his kindly way of how "the bond of a common faith enables Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to the Japanese." There were many things we foreigners did not understand. We did not understand, for example, that "A man's a man for a' that" was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese. I was to remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural life, that they had had to coin a word for "problems." Above all, I must be careful not to "exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality." Uchimura asserted sweepingly that "morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not found in Japan." We of the West underrated the value of the part played by the Puritans in our development. Our moral life had been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ. To deny this was "kicking your own mother." Just as it was not possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to obtain it from the sources at his disposal.