pronounced than among the unconverted.  Individual instances of extreme consciousness of sin are not unknown, especially under the earlier Protestant preaching.  If the Christians of the last decade have less sense of sin, it is due to the changed character of recent preaching, in consequence of the changed conception of Christianity widely accepted in Protestant lands.  Who will undertake to say that Christians in New England of the nineteenth century have the same oppressive sense of sin that was customary in the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries?  The sense of sin is due more to the character of the dominant religious ideas of the age than to brain structure or to race nature.  I cannot agree with Mr. Takahashi that “To be religious one needs a Semitic tinge of mind.”  It is not a question of mind, of race nature, but of dominant ideas.

In this connection I may refer to an incident that came under my notice some years ago.  A young man applied for membership in the Kumamoto Church, who at one time had been a student in one of my Bible classes.  I had not known that he had received any special help from his study with me, until I heard his statement as to how he had discovered his need of a Saviour, and had found that need satisfied in Christ.  In his statement before the examining committee of the church, he said that when he first read the thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians, he was so impressed with its beauty as a poem that he wrote it out entire on one of the fusuma (light paper doors) of his room, and each morning, as he arose, he read it.  This practice continued several weeks.  Then, as we continued our study of the Bible, we took up the third chapter of John, and when he came to the sixteenth verse, he was so impressed with its statement that he wrote that beside the poem from Corinthians, and read them together.  Gradually this daily reading, together with the occasional sermons and other Christian addresses which he heard at the Boys’ School, led him to desire to secure for himself the love described by Paul, and to know more vitally the love of God described by John.  It occurred to him, that, to secure these ends, he should pray.  Upon doing so he said that, for the first time in his life, his unworthiness and his really sinful nature overwhelmed him.  This was, of course, but the beginning of his Christian life.  He began then to search the Scriptures in earnest, and with increasing delight.  It was not long before he wished to make public confession of his faith, and thus identify himself with the Christian community.  This brief account of the way in which this young man was brought to Christ illustrates a good many points, but that for which I have cited it is the testimony it bears to the fact that under similar circumstances the human heart undergoes very much the same religious experience, whatever be the race or nationality of the individual.