Looked at closely, and studied in its implications, what is this but a developing form of communal religion?  No nation is conceived as existing apart; each exists as but one fraction of the world-wide community; in its relations it has both rights and duties.  Does this not mean that appeal has been made from the communal sanctions of might to the supra-communal sanctions of right?  We do not simply ask what do other nations think of this or that national act, but what is right, in view of the whole order of the nature which has brought man into being and set him in families and nations.  In other words, national rights and duties are felt to flow from the supra-mundane source, God the Creator of heaven and earth and all that in them is.  The sanctions for national rights and duties are religious sanctions and rest on a religious world-view.

Now the point, of interest for us is the fact that Japan has entered into this universal community and is feeling the sanctions of this universal communal religion.  The international rights and duties of Japan are a theme of frequent discourse and conversation.  Japan stoutly maintained that the war with China was a “gi-sen,” a righteous war, waged primarily for the sake of Korea.  Many a Japanese waxes indignant over the cruelty of the Turk, the savage barbarity of the Spaniard, and the impotence and supineness of England and Europe.  I have already spoken of the young man who became so indignant at England’s compelling China to take Indian opium, that he proposed to go to England to preach an anti-opium crusade.  Japan is beginning to enter into the larger communal life of the world, although, of course, she has as yet little perception of its varied implications.

Many a student of New Japan perceives that she is abandoning her old religious conceptions, and that many moral and social evils are entering the land, who yet does not see that the wide acceptance of some new religion by the people is important for the maintenance of the nation.  Some earnest Japanese thinkers are beginning to realize that religion is, indeed, needful to steady the national life, but they fail to see that Christianity alone fulfills the condition.  Many are saying that a religion scientifically constructed must be manufactured especially for Japan.

The reason why individualistic religion takes such an important part in the higher evolution of man is, in a word, because the religious sanctions are so much more powerful than all others, either legal or social.  For the legal sanctions are chiefly negative; they are also partial and uncertain, and easily evaded by the selfish individual.  The social sanctions, too, are often far from just or impartial or wise.  Furthermore, the rise of individualism in the social order secures privacy for the individual, and so far forth removes him from the restraints and stimuli of the social sanctions.  It is the religious sanctions alone that follow the man in every waking moment.  Not one of all his acts escapes the eye of the religious judgment.  He is his own judge, and he cannot escape bearing witness against himself.