the way of truth, the gods will protect one even though he does not pray.”  It laid stress on practical moralities, regardless of their philosophical presumptions, into which it would not probe.  When pressed it would ascribe all to “Heaven,” and, as we have seen, it had many implications that would lead the inquiring mind to a belief in the personal nature of “Heaven.”  Had it developed these implications, Bushido would have become a genuine religion.  It was indeed a system of ethics touched with emotion, it was religious, but it failed to become the religion it might have become because it insisted on its agnosticism and refused to worship the highest and best it knew.

It is interesting to observe that the ideals and sanctions of Confucianism produced effects which proved its ruin.  They did this in two ways; first, by developing the prolonged peace necessary for a high grade of scholarship which, turning its attention to ancient history, discovered that the Shogunate was assuming powers not in accord with the primitive practice nor in accord with the theory of the divine descent of the Imperial house.  Imperialistic patriots arose, whose aim was to overthrow the Shogunate and restore the Emperor.  They felt that, doing this, they were right; that is to say, they became inspired by the Shinto sanctions for a national life.  They thus discovered the defect of the disjointed feudal system sanctioned by feudal Confucianism.  The second cause of its undoing grew out of the first.  The scholarship which led the patriots against the usurper in political life led them also against all foreign innovations such as Buddhism and Confucianism, which they scorned as modern and anti-imperial.  The Shinto cultus thus received a powerful revival.  With the overthrow of the Shogunate in 1868 Confucianism naturally went with it, and for a time Shinto was the state religion.  But its poverty in every line, except the communal sanctions, caused it in a short time to lose its place.

The two causes just assigned for the fall of Bushido, however, could hardly have wrought its ruin had it been more than a utilitarian and agnostic system of morality, calculated to maintain the social ascendency of a small fraction of the nation.  As a religion, Bushido would have secured a conservative power enabling it to survive, by adapting itself to a changed social order.  As it was, Bushido was snuffed out by a single breath of the breeze that began to blow from foreign lands.  As an ethical system it has conferred a blessing on Japan that should never be forgotten.  But its identification with a class and a clan social order rendered it too narrow for the national and international life into which the nation was forced by circumstances beyond its control, and its agnostic utilitarianism did not provide it with sufficient moral power to cope with the problems of the new individualistic age that had suddenly burst upon it.  In all Japan there remains to the present day only one of those