power of the imagination and by sympathy with the primeval man.  To the critical student, however, who has lived among the people and the temples devoted to this worship, who knows how innocent and how truly sincere and even reverent and devout in the use of these symbols the worshippers are, the matter is measurably clear.  He can understand the soil, root and flower even while the most strange specimen is abhorrent to his taste, and while he is most active in destroying that mental climate in which such worship, whether native or exotic, can exist and flourish.

In none of the instances in which I have been eyewitness of the cult, of the person officiating or of the emblem, have I had any reason to doubt the sincerity of the worshipper.  I have never had reason to look upon the implements or the system as anything else than the endeavor of man to solve the mystery of Being and Power.  In making use of these emblems, the Japanese worshipper simply professes his faith in such solution as has seemed to him attainable.

That this cultus was quite general in pre-Buddhistic Japan, as in many other ancient countries, is certain from the proofs of language, literature, external monuments and relics which are sufficiently numerous.  Its organic connection with the god-way may be clearly shown.

To go farther back in point of time than the “Kojiki,” we find that even before the development of art in very ancient Japan, the male gods were represented by a symbol which thus became an image of the deity himself.  This token was usually made of stone, though often of wood, and in later times of terra-cotta, of cast and wrought iron and even of gold.[12]

Under the direct influence of such a cult, other objects appealed to the imagination or served the temporary purpose of the worshipper as ex-voto to hang up in the shrines, such as the mushroom, awabi, various other shells and possibly the fire-drill.  It is only in the decay of the cultus, in the change of view and centre of thought compelled by another religion, that representations of the old emblems ally themselves with sensualism or immorality.  It is that natural degradation of one man’s god into another man’s devil, which conversion must almost of necessity bring, that makes the once revered symbol “obscene,” and talk about it become, in a descending scale, dirty, foul, filthy, nasty.  That the Japanese suffer from the moral effluvia of a decayed cult which was once as the very vertebral column of the national body of religion, is evident to every one who acquaints himself with their popular speech and literature.