Yet this statement must be carefully guarded.  If we may judge from some recent decrees of the Educational Department, it would appear that a large and powerful section of the nation is still ignorant of the real nature and significance of “religious liberty.”  Under the plea of maintaining secular education, the Educational Department has forbidden informal and private Christian teaching, even in private schools.  An adequate statement of the present struggle for complete religious liberty would occupy many pages.  We note but one important point.

In the very act of forbidding religious instruction in all schools the Educational Department is virtually establishing a brand-new religion for Japan, a religion based on the Imperial Educational Edict.[CF] The essentially religious nature of the attitude taken by the government toward this Edict has become increasingly clear in late years.  In the summer of 1898 one who has had special opportunities of information told me that Mr. Kinoshita, a high official in the Educational Department, suggested the ceremonial worship of the Emperor’s picture and edict by all the schools, for the reason that he saw the need of cultivating the religious spirit of reverence together with the need for having religious sanctions for the moral law.  He felt convinced that a national school system without any such sanctions would be helpless in teaching morality to the pupils.  His suggestion was adopted by the Educational Department and has been enforced.

In this attitude toward the religious character of entirely private schools, the government is materially abridging the religious liberty of the people.  It is abridging their liberty of carrying belief into action in one important respect, that, namely, of giving a Christian education.  It virtually insists on the acceptance of that form of religion which apotheosizes the Emperor, and finds the sanctions for morality in his edict; it excludes from the schools every other form of religion.  It should, of course, be said that this attitude is maintained not only toward Christian schools, but theoretically also toward all religious schools.  It, however, operates more severely on Christian schools than upon others, because Christians are the only ones who establish high-grade schools for secular education under religious influences.

It is evident, therefore, that in the matter of religious liberty the present attitude of the government is paradoxical, granting in one breath, what, in an important respect, it denies in the next.  But throughout all these changes and by means of them we see more and more clearly that even religious tolerance is a matter of the prevailing social ideas and of the dominant social order, rather than of inherent race character.  By a single transformation of the social order, Japan passed from a state of perfect religious intolerance to one just the reverse, so far as individual belief was concerned.