“The essentials, not the forms of Christianity,” he declared, would save the countryside by “brotherly union.”  “Brotherly union” would make a better life and a better agriculture.  The rural class, he explained, was more sharply divided than foreigners understood into owners of land who lived on their rents and farmers who farmed[105].  The division between the two classes was “as great as an Indian caste division.”  “To the landowner who lives in his village like a feudal lord the simple Gospel, with its insistence on the sacredness of work, comes as an intellectual revolution.”  Women as well as men of means received from Christianity “a new conception of humanity.”  They ceased to “look upon their own glory and to take delight in the flattery of poor people.”  They changed their way of speaking to the peasants.  They developed an interest, of which they knew nothing before, in the spiritual and material betterment of the men, women and children of their village.

I went a two-days journey into the country with Uchimura.  We stayed at the house of a landowner who was one of his adherents.  I found myself in a large room where two swallows were flitting, intent on building on a beam which yearly bore a nest.  In this room stood a shrine containing the ancestral tablets.  The daily offerings were no longer made, but Uchimura’s counsel, unlike that of some zealots, was to preserve not only this shrine but the large family shrine in the courtyard.  Near by was an engraving of Luther.

[Illustration:  “THE JAPANESE CARLYLE.” p. 90]

[Illustration:  MR. AND MRS. YANAGI. p. 98]

Uchimura spoke in the house to some thirty or more “people of the district who had accepted Christianity.”  His appeal was to “live Christianity as given to the world by its founder.”  The address, which was delivered from an arm-chair, was based on the fifth chapter of Matthew, which in the preacher’s copy appeared to contain cross-references to two disciples called Tolstoy and Carlyle.  When I was asked to speak I found that the women in the gathering had places in front.  “The remarkable effect of Christianity among those who have come to think with us,” Uchimura told me afterwards, “is seen most in their treatment of women.  Our host, had he not been a Christian, would have been credited by public opinion with the possession of a concubine, and would not have been blamed for it.”  When, after the speaking, we knelt in a circle and talked less formally of how best to benefit rural people, we were joined by the women folk.  Later, when a dozen of the neighbours were invited to dinner, it was not served at separate tables for each kneeling guest, but at one long table, an innovation “to indicate the brotherly relation.”

[Illustration:  CHILDREN CATCHING INSECTS ON RICE-SEED BEDS]

[Illustration:  MASTERS OF A COUNTRY SCHOOL AND SOME OF THE CHILDREN. p. 112]