An undeveloped religion, still bound up with polytheistic symbolism, with its charms and mementoes, inevitably suffers severely at the hands of exact modern science.  For the educated minority, especially, the inevitable reaction is to complete skepticism, to apparent irreligion.  For the time being, religion itself may appear to have been discredited.  In an advancing age, prophets of religious dissolution are abundant.  Such prophecies, with reference to Christianity, have been frequent, and are not unheard even now.  Particular beliefs and practices of religion have indeed changed and passed away, even in Christianity.  But the essentially religious nature of man has re-asserted itself in every case, and the outward expressions of that nature have thereby only become freer from elements of error and superstition.  Exactly this is taking place in Japan to-day.  The apparent irreligion of to-day is the groundwork of the purer religion of to-morrow.

If the Japanese are emotional and sentimental, we should expect them to be, perhaps more than most peoples, religious.  This expectation is not disappointed by a study of their history.  However imperfect as a religion we must pronounce original Shinto to have been, consisting of little more than a cultus and a theogony, yet even with this alone the Japanese should be pronounced a religious people.  The universality of the respect and adoration, not to say love, bestowed throughout the ages of history on the “Kami” (the multitudinous Gods of Shintoism), is a standing witness to the depth of the religious feeling in the Japanese heart.  True, it is associated with the sentiments of love of ancestors and country, with filial piety and loyalty; but these, so far from lowering the religion, make it more truly religious?

Unending lines of pilgrims, visiting noted Shinto temples and climbing sacred mountain peaks, arrest the attention of every thoughtful student of Japan.  These pilgrims are numbered by the hundreds of thousands every year.  The visitors to the great shrine at Kizuki of Izumo number about 250,000 annually.  “The more prosperous the season, the larger the number of pilgrims.  It rarely falls below two hundred thousand.”  In his “Occult Japan,” Mr. Lowell has given us an interesting account of the “pilgrim clubs,” The largest known to him numbered about twelve thousand men, but he thinks they average from one hundred to about five hundred persons each.  The number of yearly visitors to the Shinto shrines at Ise is estimated at half a million, and ten thousand pilgrims climb Mt.  Fuji every summer.  The number of pilgrims to Kompira, in Shikoku, is incredibly large; according to the count taken during the first half of 1898, the first ever taken, the average for six months was 2500 each day; at this rate the number for the year is nearly 900,000.  The highest for a single day was over 12,000.  These figures were given me by the chief official of this district.  The highest