their expenses from the mission, while pursuing their studies, have felt that they were thereby under any special debt of gratitude.  An experience that a missionary had with a class to which he had been teaching the Bible in English for about a year is illustrative.  At the close of the school year they invited him to a dinner where they made some very pleasant speeches, and bade each other farewell for the summer.  The teacher was much gratified with the result of the year’s work, feeling naturally that these boys were his firm friends.  But the following September when he returned, not only did the class not care to resume their studies with him, but they appeared to desire to have nothing whatever to do with him.  On the street many of them would not even recognize him.  Other similar cases come to mind, and it should be remembered that missionaries give such instruction freely and always at the request of the recipient.  In the case cited the teacher came to the conclusion that the elaborate dinner and fine farewell speeches were considered by the young men as a full discharge of all debts of gratitude and a full compensation for services.  This, however, is to be said:  the city itself was at that time the seat of a determined antagonism to Christianity and, of course, to the Christian missionary; and this fact may in part, but not wholly, account for the appearance of ingratitude.

The Japanese pride themselves on their gratitude.  It is, however, limited in its scope.  It is vigorous toward the dead and toward the Emperor, but as a grace of daily life it is not conspicuous.

Few achievements of the Japanese have been more remarkable than the suppression of certain religious phenomena.  Any complete statement of the religious characteristics of the Japanese fifty years ago would have included most revolting and immoral practices under the guise of religion.  Until suppressed by the government in the early years of Meiji there were in many parts of Japan phallic shrines of considerable popularity, at which, on festivals at least, sexual immorality seemed to be an essential part of the worship.  At Uji, not far from Kyoto, the capital of the Empire, for a thousand years and more, and the center of Buddhism, there was a shrine of great repute and popularity.  Thither resorted the multitudes for bacchanalian purposes.  Under the auspices of the Goddess Hashihime and the God Sumiyoshi, free rein was given to lust.  Since the beginning of the new regime such revels have been forbidden and apparently stopped; the phallic symbols themselves are no longer visible, although it is asserted by the keeper of the shrine that they are still there, concealed in the boxes on the pedestals formerly occupied by the symbols.  When I visited the place some years since with a fellow missionary we were told that multitudes still come there to pray to the deities; those seeking divorce pray to the female deity, while those seeking a favorable marriage pray to the male