What Buddhism failed to give, Shintoism offered in abundance.  Such loyalty to the sovereign, such reverence for ancestral memory, and such filial piety as are not taught by any other creed, were inculcated by the Shinto doctrines, imparting passivity to the otherwise arrogant character of the samurai.  Shinto theology has no place for the dogma of “original sin.”  On the contrary, it believes in the innate goodness and God-like purity of the human soul, adoring it as the adytum from which divine oracles are proclaimed.  Everybody has observed that the Shinto shrines are conspicuously devoid of objects and instruments of worship, and that a plain mirror hung in the sanctuary forms the essential part of its furnishing.  The presence of this article, is easy to explain:  it typifies the human heart, which, when perfectly placid and clear, reflects the very image of the Deity.  When you stand, therefore, in front of the shrine to worship, you see your own image reflected on its shining surface, and the act of worship is tantamount to the old Delphic injunction, “Know Thyself.”  But self-knowledge does not imply, either in the Greek or Japanese teaching, knowledge of the physical part of man, not his anatomy or his psycho-physics; knowledge was to be of a moral kind, the introspection of our moral nature.  Mommsen, comparing the Greek and the Roman, says that when the former worshiped he raised his eyes to heaven, for his prayer was contemplation, while the latter veiled his head, for his was reflection.  Essentially like the Roman conception of religion, our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the national consciousness of the individual.  Its nature-worship endeared the country to our inmost souls, while its ancestor-worship, tracing from lineage to lineage, made the Imperial family the fountain-head of the whole nation.  To us the country is more than land and soil from which to mine gold or to reap grain—­it is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirits of our forefathers:  to us the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Rechtsstaat, or even the Patron of a Culturstaat—­he is the bodily representative of Heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy.  If what M. Boutmy[5] says is true of English royalty—­that it “is not only the image of authority, but the author and symbol of national unity,” as I believe it to be, doubly and trebly may this be affirmed of royalty in Japan.

[Footnote 5:  The English People, p. 188.]

The tenets of Shintoism cover the two predominating features of the emotional life of our race—­Patriotism and Loyalty.  Arthur May Knapp very truly says:  “In Hebrew literature it is often difficult to tell whether the writer is speaking of God or of the Commonwealth; of heaven or of Jerusalem; of the Messiah or of the nation itself."[6] A similar confusion may be noticed in the nomenclature of our national faith.  I said confusion, because it will be so deemed by a