This character led to another inevitable difficulty.  Although Buddhism ostensibly adopted Shinto deities and the Shinto sanctions for the social order, it could not wholeheartedly accept the sanctions nor take the deities into full and legitimate partnership.  It found no place in its circle of doctrine to teach the important tenets of Shintoism.

It left them to survive or perish as chance would have it.  In proportion as Buddhism absorbed the life and love of the people, Shinto fell into decay and with it its sanctions.  Then came the centuries of civil war during which Imperial power and authority sank to a minimum, and Japan’s ignominy and disorder reached their maximum.  What the land now needed was the re-introduction, first, of social order, even though it must be by the hand of a dictator, and second, the development of religious sanctions for the order that should be established.  The first was secured by those three great generals of Japan, Oda Nobunaga, the Taiko Hideyoshi, and Tokugawa Ieyasu.  “The first conceived the idea of centralizing all the authority of the state in a single person; the second, who has been called the Napoleon of Japan, actually put the idea into practice,” but died before consolidating his work; the third, by his unsurpassed skill as a diplomat and administrator, carried the idea completely out, arranging the details of the new order so that, without special military genius or power on the part of his successors, the order maintained itself for 250 years.

Yet it is doubtful if this long maintenance of the social order introduced by Ieyasu would have been possible had he not found ready to hand a system of essentially religious sanctions for the social order he had established by force.  Confucianism had lain for a thousand years a dormant germ, receiving some study from learned men, but having no special relation to the education of the day or to the political problems that became each century more pressing.  In the Confucian doctrines of loyalty to ruler and piety to parents, a doctrine sanctioned by Heaven and by the customs of all the ancients, Ieyasu, with the insight of a master mind, found just the sanctions he desired.  He had the Confucian classics printed—­it is said for the first time in Japan—­“and the whole intellect of the country became molded by Confucian ideas.”  The classics, edited with diacritical marks for Japanese students, “formed the chief vehicle of every boy’s education.”  These were interpreted by learned Chinese commentators.  The intelligence of the land drank of this stream as the European mind refreshed itself with the classic waters of the Renaissance.  The Japanese were weary of Buddhistic puerilities and transcendental doctrines that led nowhere.  They demanded sanctions for the moral life and the social order; in response to this need Buddhism gave them Nirvana—­absolute mental and moral vacuity.  Confucianism gave them principles whose working and whose results they could