writers and their fancies, nor even from the books which profess to describe these divinities, do we get such an idea of their real meaning and of their influence with the people, as we do by observation of every-day practice, and a study of the idols themselves and of Japanese folk-lore, popular romance, local history and guidebooks.  Those familiar divinities, indeed, at the present day owe their vitality rather to the artists than to priests, and, it may be, have received, together with some rather rude handling, nearly the whole of their extended popularity and influence from their lay supporters.  The Seven Happy Gods of Fortune form nominally a Buddhist assemblage, and their effigies on the kami-dana or god-shelf, found in nearly every Japanese house, are universally visible.  The child in Japan is rocked to sleep by the soothing sound of the lullaby, which is often a prayer to these gods.  Even though it may be with laughing and merriment, that, in their name the evil gods and imps are exorcised annually on New Year’s eve, with showers of beans which are supposed to be as disagreeable to the Buddhist demons “as drops of holy water to the Devil,” yet few households are complete without one or more of the images or the pictures of these favorite deities.

The separate elements of this conglomerate, so typical of Japanese religion, are from no fewer than four different sources:  Brahmanism, Buddhism, Taoism and Shint[=o]ism.  “Thus, Bishamon is the Buddhist Vais’ramana[42] and the Brahmanic Kuvera; Benten is Sarasvati, the wife of Brahma; Daikoku is an extremely popularised form of Mahakala, the black-faced Temple Guardian; Hotei has Taoist attributes, but is regarded as an incarnation of Maitreya, the Buddhist Messiah; Fuku-roku-jiu is of purely Taoist origin, and is perhaps a personification of Lao-Tsze himself; Ju-ro-jin is almost certainly a duplicate of Fuku-roku-jiu; and, lastly, Ebisu, as the son of Izanagi and Izanami, is a contribution from the Shint[=o] hero-worship."[43] If Riy[=o]bu Buddhism be two-fold, here is a texture or amalgam that is shi-bu, four-fold.  Let us watch lest go-bu, with Christianity mixed in, be the next result of the process.  To play the Japanese game of go-ban, with Christianity as the fifth counter, and Jesus as a Palestinian avatar of some Dhyani Buddha, crafty priests in Japan are even now planning.

This illustration of the Seven Gods of Happiness, whose local characters, functions and relations have been developed especially within the last three or four hundred years, is but one of many that could be adduced, showing what proceeded on a larger scale.  The Riy[=o]bu process made it almost impossible for the average native to draw the line between history and mythology.  It destroyed the boundary lines, as Pantheism invariably does, between fact and fiction, truth and falsehood.  The Japanese mind, by a natural, possibly by a racial, tendency, falls easily into Pantheism, which may be called the destroyer