Thus has Japan come to the parting of the ways.  What Japan needs to-day is a religion satisfying the intellect as to its world-view, and thus justifying the sanctions it holds out.  These must be neither exclusively communal, like those of Shinto, nor exclusively individual, like those of Buddhism.  While maintaining at their full value the sanctions for the social life, it must add thereto the sanctions for the individual.  It must not look upon the individual as a being whose salvation depends on his being isolated from, taken out of the community, as Buddhism did and does, nor yet as a mere fraction of the community, as Confucianism did, but as a complete, imperishable unit of infinite worth, necessarily living a double life, partly inseparable from the social order and partly superior to it.  This religion must provide not only sanctions, but ideals, for a perfect social order in which, while the most complex organization of society shall be possible, the freedom and the high development of the individual’s personality shall also be secured.

The fulfillment of such conditions would at first thought seem to be impossible.  How can a religion give sanctions which at the very time that they authorize the fullest development and organization of society, apparently making society its chief end, also assume the fullest liberty and development of the individual, making him and his salvation its chief end?  Are not these ends incompatible?  What has been said already along this general line of thought has prepared us to see that they are not.  The great, though unconscious, need of the ages, and the unconscious effort of all religious evolution has been the development of just such a religion.  As the “cake” of social custom was at first the great need for, and afterwards the great obstacle in the way of, social evolution, so the sanctions of a communal religion were at first the great need for, and afterwards the great obstacle in the way of, religious evolution and of personal development.  Through its sanctions religion is the most powerful of all the factors of the higher human evolution, either helping it onward or holding it back.

Has, then, any religion secured such a dual development as we have just seen to be necessary?  As a matter of fact, one and only one has done so, Christianity.  This religion clearly attains and maintains the apparently impossible combination of individualism and communalism by the nature of its conception of the method of individual salvation.  Its communalism is guaranteed by, because it rests on, its individualism.  At the very moment that it pronounces the individual of inestimable worth,—­a son of God,—­it commands him to show that sonship by loving all God’s other sons, and by serving them to the extent of self-sacrifice, and of death if need be.  Its communalism is thus inseparable from its individualism and its individualism from its communalism.