There is, however, a movement discernible which may be called the New Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins.  It is democratic, optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it is hospitable to science and every form of truth.  It is catholic in spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist controvertists.  It is represented by earnest writers who look to natural and spiritual means, rather than to external and mechanical methods.  As a whole, we may say that Japanese Buddhism is still strong to-day in its grip upon the people.  Though unquestionably moribund, its death will be delayed.  Despite its apparent interest in, and harmony with, contemporaneous statements of science, it does not hold the men of thought, or those who long for the spiritual purification and moral elevation of Japan.

Are the Japanese eager for reform?  Do they possess that quality of emotion in which a tormenting sense of sin, and a burning desire for self-surrender to holiness, are ever manifest?

Frankly and modestly, we give our opinion.  We think not.  The average Japanese man has not come to that self-consciousness, that searching of heart, that self-seeing of sin in the light of a Holy God’s countenance which the gospel compels.  Yet this is exactly what the Japanese need.  Only Christ’s gospel can give it.

The average man of culture in Dai Nippon has to-day no religion.  He is waiting for one.  What shall be the issue, in the contest between a faith that knows no personal God, no Creator, no atonement, no gospel of salvation from sin, and the gospel which bids man seek and know the great First Cause, as Father and Friend, and proclaims that this Infinite Friend seeks man to bless him, to bestow upon him pardon and holiness and to give him earthly happiness and endless life?  Between one religion which teaches personality in God and in man, and another which offers only a quagmire of impersonality wherein a personal god and an individual soul exist only as the jack-lights of the marsh, mere phosphorescent gleams of decay, who can fail to choose?  Of the two faiths, which shall be victor?

CHAPTER X — JAPANESE BUDDHISM IN ITS MISSIONARY DEVELOPMENT

    “The heart of my country, the power of my country, the Light of
    my country, is Buddhism.”—­Yatsubuchi, of Japan.

    “Buddhism was the teacher under whose instruction the Japanese
    nation grew up.”—­Chamberlain.

    “Buddhism was the civilizer.  It came with the freshness of
    religious zeal, and religious zeal was a novelty.  It come as the
    bearer of civilization and enlightenment.”