That there are philosophical or, more correctly speaking, metaphysical difficulties attending this doctrine, I am well aware; and that they are felt by some few Japanese, I also know.  But I maintain that these difficulties have been imported from the West.  The difficulties raised by a sensational philosophy which results in denying the reality even of man’s psychic nature, no less than the difficulties due to a thoroughgoing idealism, have both been introduced among educated Japanese and have found no little response.  I am persuaded that the real causes of the doubt entertained by a few of the Christians in Japan as to the personality of God are of foreign origin.  These doubts are to be answered in exactly the same way as the same difficulties are answered in other lands.  It must be shown that the sensational and “positive” philosophies, ending in agnosticism as to all the great problems of life and of reality, are essentially at fault in not recognizing the nature of the mind that knows.  The searching criticism of these assumptions and methods made by T.H.  Green and other careful thinkers, and to which no answer has been made by the sensational and agnostic schools of thought, needs to be presented in intelligible Japanese for the fairly educated Japanese student and layman.  So, too, the discussions of such writers and philosophical thinkers as Seth, and Illingworth, and especially Lotze, whose discussions of “personality” are unsurpassed, should be presented to Japanese thinkers in native garb.  But, again I repeat, it seems to me that the difficulty felt in Japan on these subjects is due not to the “impersonality” of the language or the native mind, or to the hitherto prevalent religions, but wholly to the imported philosophies and sciences.  The individuals who feel or at least express any sense of difficulty on these topics—­so far at least as my knowledge of the subject goes—­are not those who know nothing but their own language and their own native religions, but rather those who have had exceptional advantages in foreign study, many of them having spent years abroad in Western universities.  They furnish a fresh revelation of the quickness with which the Japanese take up with new ideas.  They did not evolve these difficulties for themselves, but gathered them from their reading of Western literature and by their mingling with men of unevangelical temper and thought in the West.]

[Footnote DD:  “Sacred Books of the East,” vol. xlix, part ii. p. 147.]

[Footnote DE:  Cf. chapters xiii. and xxxi.]

[Footnote DF:  It is not strange that in all the centers of this new learning Confucius was deified and worshiped.  In connection with many schools established for the study of his works, temples were built to his honor, in which his statue alone was placed, before which a stately religious service was performed at regular intervals.  Thus did Confucianism become a living and vitalizing, although, as we shall soon see, an incomplete religion.]