Now, it is manifest that where superior beings and man’s relation to these and the corresponding religious sanctions are defectively conceived, as, for instance, quite apart either from the individual or the communal life, they are valueless to the higher evolution of man and have little interest for the student of social evolution.  In proportion, however, as man advances in intellectual grasp of religious truths and in susceptibility to the moral ideas and religious sanctions they provide, conceiving of morality and religion as inseparable parts of the same system, the more powerfully does religion enter into and promote man’s higher evolution.  An individualistic social order demands the religious sanctions more imperatively than a communal social order; for, in proportion as it is individualistic, the social order is weak in compelling, through the legal and social sanctions alone, the communal or altruistic activity of the individual.  Altruistic spirit and action, however, are essential to the maintenance even of that individualistic order.  The more highly society develops, therefore, the more religious must each member of the society become.

The same truth may be stated from another standpoint.  The higher man develops, the more impatient he becomes with illogical reasonings and defective conceptions; he thus becomes increasingly skeptical in regard to current traditional religions with their crude, primitive ideas; he is accordingly increasingly freed from the restraints they impose.  But unless he finds some new religious sanctions for the communal life, for social conduct, and for the individual life,—­ideals and sanctions that command his assent and direct his life,—­he will drop back into a thoroughgoing atomic, individualistic, selfish life, which can be only a hindrance to the higher development both of society and of the individual.  In order that men advancing in intellectual ability may remain useful members of society, they must remain subject to those ideals and sanctions which will actually secure social conduct.  While disregarding the chaff of primitive religious superstitions and ceremonials man must retain the wheat; he must feel the force of the religious spirit in a deeper and profounder, because more personal way than did his ancestors.  Increasing intellectual power and knowledge must be balanced by increasing individual experience of the religious motives and spirit.  This is the reason why each advancing age should study afresh the whole religious problem, and state in the terms of its own experience the prominent and permanent religious truths of all the ages and the sanctions that flow from them.  Hence it is that a religion only traditional and ceremonial is quite unfitted for a developing life.

Japan is no exception to the general laws of human evolution.  As her intellectual abilities increase, the forms of her old religious life will become increasingly unacceptable to the people at large.  If, in rejecting the obsolete forms of religious thought, she rejects religion and its sanctions altogether, atomistic individualism can be the only result, and with it wide moral corruption will eat out the vitality of the national life.