Are we to say that the Japanese are more courageous than other peoples?  Although no other people have manifested such phenomena as the Japanese in regard to suicide for loyalty, yet any true appreciation of Western peoples will at once dispel the idea that they lack courage.  Manifestations of courage differ according to the nature of the social order, but no nation could long maintain itself, to say nothing of coming into existence, without a high degree of this endowment.

But Japanese courage is not entirely of the physical order, although that is the form in which it has chiefly shown itself thus far.  The courage of having and holding one’s own convictions is known in Japan as elsewhere.  There has been a long line of martyrs.  During the decades after the introduction of Buddhism, there was such opposition that it required much courage for converts to hold to their beliefs.  So, too, at the time of the rise of the new Buddhist sects, there was considerable persecution, especially with the rise of the Nichiren Shu.  And when the testing time of Christianity came, under the edict of the Tokugawas by which it was suppressed, tens of thousands were found who preferred death to the surrender of their faith.  In recent times, too, much courage has been shown by the native Christians.

As an illustration is the following:  When an eminent American teacher of Japanese youth returned to Japan after a long absence, his former pupils gathered around him with warm admiration.  They had in the interval of his absence become leaders among the trustees and faculty of the most prosperous Christian college in Japan.  He was accordingly invited to deliver a course of lectures in the Chapel.  It was generally known that he was no longer the earnest Christian that he had once been, when, as teacher in an interior town, he had inspired a band of young men who became Christians under his teaching and a power for good throughout the land.  But no one was prepared to hear such extreme denunciations of Christianity and Christian missions and missionaries as constituted the substance of his lectures.  At first the matter was passed over in silence.  But, by the end of the second lecture, the missionaries entered a protest, urging that the Christian Chapel should not again be used for such lectures.  The faculty, however, were not ready to criticise their beloved teacher.  The third lecture proved as abusive as the others; the speaker seemed to have no sense of propriety.  A glimpse of his thought, and method of expression may be gained from a single sentence:  “I have been commissioned, gentlemen, by Jesus Christ, to tell you that there is no such thing as a soul or a future life.”  Although the missionary members of the faculty urged it, the Japanese members, most of whom were his former pupils, were unwilling to take any steps whatever to prevent the continuation of the blasphemous lectures.  The students of the institution accordingly held a mass-meeting, in which