That Christianity alone, of all the religions of the world, fulfills the conditions will not need many words to prove.  As a matter of fact Christianity alone has succeeded in surviving the criticism of the nineteenth century.  In Christendom, all religions but Christianity have perished.  This is a mere matter of fact.  As for the reason, Christianity alone gives complete intellectually satisfactory sanctions for both the communal and the individualistic principles of social progress.  Christianity, as we have sufficiently shown, has both principles not unrelated to each other, but vitally interrelated.  For these reasons it is safe to maintain not only that Japan needs to find a new religion, but that the religion must be Christianity in substance, whatever be the name given it.

The Japanese have been described as essentially irreligious in nature.  We have seen how defective such a description is.  But have we not now traced one root of this seeming characteristic of New Japan?  The old religious conceptions have been largely outgrown by the educated.  They have come to the conclusion that the old religious forms constitute the whole of religion, and that consequently they are unworthy of attention.  The spirit of New Japan is indifferent to religion; but this is not due to an inherently non-religious or irreligious nature, but to the empty externalism and shallow puerilities of the only religions they know.  How can they be zealous for them or recognize any authority in them?  Those few Japanese who have come within the influence of the larger conception of religion brought to Japan by Christianity are showing a religious zeal and power supporting the contention that the generally asserted lack of a religious nature is only apparent and temporary.  Preaching the right set of ideas, those which appeal to the national sense of communal needs, by supplying the demand for sanctions for the social order; ideas which appeal to intellects molded by modern thought, by supplying such an intellectual understanding of the universe as justifies the various supra-communal sanctions; and ideas which appeal to the heart, by supplying the personal demand of each individual for a larger life, for intercourse with the Father of all Spirits and for strength for the prolonged battle of life—­preach these and kindred ideas, and the Japanese will again become as conspicuously a religious people as they were when Buddhism came to Japan a thousand years ago.[DG]

But if the real nature of a full and perfect religion is to save not only the individual, providing sanctions for his conduct, but also to justify the social order, and to provide sanctions that shall secure its maintenance, any religion which fails to have both characteristics can hardly claim the name universal.  We have seen that Buddhism lacks one of these elements.  In my judgment it is not properly universal.  So long as it exists in or goes to a land already provided with other religions securing the social order, it