of early retirement from duty; so that men were considered old at forty, and hors concours before forty-five.[37] Life was condemned as vanity of vanities before it was mature, and old age a friend that nobody wished to meet,[38] although Japanese old age is but European prime.  In a measure, Buddhism is thus responsible for the paralysis of Japanese civilization, which, like oft-tapped maple-trees, began to die at the top.  This was in accordance with its theories and its literature.  In the Bible there is, possibly, one book which is pessimistic in tone, Ecclesiastes.  In the bulky and dropsical canon of Buddhism there is a whole library of despondency and despair.

Nevertheless, the ethical element held its own in the Japanese mind; and against the pessimism and puerility of Buddhism and the religious emptiness of Shint[=o], the bond of Japanese society was sought in the idea of loyalty.  While then, as we repeat, everything that comes to the Japanese mind suffers as it were “a sea change, into something new and strange,” is it not fair to say that the change made by K[=o]b[=o] was at the expense of Buddhism as a system, and that the thing that suffered reversion was the exotic rather than the native plant?  For, in the emergence of this new idea of loyalty as supreme, Shint[=o] and not Buddhism was the dictator.

Even more after K[=o]b[=o]’s death than during his life, Japan improved upon her imported faith, and rapidly developed new sects of all degrees of reputableness and disreputableness.  Had K[=o]b[=o] lived on through the centuries, as the boors still believe;[39] he could not have stopped, had he so desired, the workings of the leaven he had brought from China.  From the sixth to the twelfth century, was the missionary age of Japanese Buddhism.  Then followed two centuries of amazing development of doctrine.  Novelties in religion blossomed, fruited and became monuments as permanent as the age-enduring forests Hakone, or Nikk[=o].  Gautama himself, were he to return to “red earth” again, could not recognize his own cult in Japan.

In China to-day Buddhism is in a bad state.  One writer calls it, “The emasculated descendant that now occupies the land with its drone of priests and its temples, in which scarce a worthy disciple of the learned patriarchs of ancient days is to be found.  Received with open arms, persecuted, patronized, smiled upon, tolerated, it with the last phase of its existence, has reached, not the halcyon days of peace and rest, but its final stage, foreshadowing its decay from rottenness and corruption."[40] So also, in a like report, agree many witnesses.  The common people of China are to-day Taoists rather than Buddhists.[41]