“So you see,” said Uchimura, as we walked to the station in the morning, “in an antiquated book, which, I suppose, stands dusty on the shelves of some of your reformers, there is power to achieve the very things they aim at.”  He went on to explain that he looked “in the lives of hearers, not in what they say,” for results from his teaching.  He believed in liberty and freedom, in sowing the seed of change and reform and allowing people to develop as they would.  “Let men and women believe as they have light.”

He spoke in his kindly way of how “the bond of a common faith enables Japanese to get closer to the foreigner and the foreigner closer to the Japanese.”  There were many things we foreigners did not understand.  We did not understand, for example, that “A man’s a man for a’ that” was an unfamiliar conception to a Japanese.  I was to remember, when I interrogated Japanese about the problems of rural life, that they had had to coin a word for “problems.”  Above all, I must be careful not to “exaggerate the quality of Eastern morality.”  Uchimura asserted sweepingly that “morality in the Anglo-Saxon sense is not found in Japan.”  We of the West underrated the value of the part played by the Puritans in our development.  Our moral life had been evolved by the soul-stirring power of the Hebrew prophets and of Christ.  To deny this was “kicking your own mother.”  Just as it was not possible for the Briton or American to get his present morality from Greece and Rome exclusively, it was not possible for the Japanese to obtain it from the sources at his disposal.

The faults of the Eastern were that he thought too much of outward conduct.  Good political and neighbourly-relations, kindliness, honesty and thrift were his idea of morality.  “To love goodness and to hate evil with one’s whole soul is a Christian conception for which you may search in vain through heathendom.”  The horror which the Western man of high character felt when he thought of the future of the little girls in attendance on geisha was not a horror generated by Plato.  “Heathen life looks nice on the outside to foreigners,” but Confucianism, Buddhism and Shintoism had all been weak in their attitude towards immorality.  It was Christianity alone which controlled sexual life.  Without deep-seated love of and joy in goodness and deep-seated horror of evil it was impossible to reform society.

Uchimura said that it had taken him thirty years to reach the conviction that the best way of raising his countrymen was by preaching the religion of “a despised foreign peasant.”  Many things he had been told by exponents of Christianity now seemed “very strange,” but there remained in the first four books of the New Testament, in the essence of Christianity, principles “which would give new life to all men.”  Moved by this belief, Uchimura and his friends gave their lives to the work of the Gospel, to a work attended by humiliations; “but this is our glory.”