Partly because of the custom of “abdication.”  As “family abdication” is frequent, it has a perceptible effect on the general character of the nation, and accounts in part for rash business ventures and other signs of impetuosity and unbalanced judgment.  Furthermore, under the new civilization, the older men have become unfitted to do the required work.  The younger and more flexible members of the rising generation can quickly adjust themselves to the new conditions, as in the schools, where the older men, who had received only the regular training in Chinese classics, were utterly incompetent as teachers of science.  Naturally, therefore, except for instruction in these classics, the common-school teachers, during the earlier decades, were almost wholly young boys.  The extreme youthfulness of school-teachers has constantly surprised me.  In the various branches of government this same phenomenon is equally common.  Young men have been pushed forward into positions with a rapidity and in numbers unknown in the West, and perhaps unknown in any previous age in Japan.

The rise and decline of the Christian Church in Japan has been instanced as a sign of the fickleness of the people.  It is a mistaken instance, for there are many other causes quite sufficient to account for the phenomenon in question.  Let me illustrate by the experience of an elderly Christian.  He had been brought to Christ through the teachings of a young man of great brilliancy, whose zeal was not tempered with full knowledge—­which, however, was not strange, in view of his limited opportunities for learning.  His instruction was therefore narrow, not to say bigoted.  Still the elderly gentleman found the teachings of the young man sufficiently strong and clear thoroughly to upset all his old ideas of religion, his polytheism, his belief in charms, his worship of ancestors, and all kindred ideas.  He accepted the New Testament in simple unquestioning faith.  But, after six or eight years, the young instructor began to lose his own primitive and simple faith.  He at once proceeded to attack that which before he had been defending and expounding.  Soon his whole theological position was changed.  Higher criticism and religious philosophy were now the center of his preaching and writing.  The result was that this old gentleman was again in danger of being upset in his religious thinking.  He felt that his new faith had been received in bulk, so to speak, and if a part of it were false, as his young teacher now asserted, how could he know that any of it was true?  Yet his heart’s experience told him that he had secured something in this faith that was real; he was loath to lose it; consequently, for some years now, he has systematically stayed away from church services, and refrained from reading magazines in which these new and destructive views have been discussed; he has preferred to read the Bible quietly at home, and to have direct communion with God, even though, in many matters of Biblical or theoretical science, he might hold his mistaken opinions.  A surface view of this man’s conduct might lead one to think of him as fickle; but a deeper consideration will lead to the opposite conclusion.