That there was worship with awe, reverence, and fear, and that the festivals and sacrifices had two purposes, one of propitiating the offended Kami and the other of purifying the worshipper, may be seen in the norito or liturgies, some of which are exceedingly beautiful.[15] In them the feelings of the gods are often referred to.  Sometimes their characters are described.  Yet one looks in vain in either the “Notices,” poems, or liturgies for anything definite in regard to these deities, or concerning morals or doctrines to be held as dogmas.  The first gods come into existence after evolution of the matter of which they are composed has taken place.  The later gods are sometimes able to tell who are their progenitors, sometimes not.  They live and fight, eat and drink, and give vent to their appetites and passions, and then they die; but exactly what becomes of them after they die, the record does not state.  Some are in heaven, some on the earth, some in Hades.  The underworld of the first cycle of tradition is by no means that of the second.[16] Some of the kami are in the water, or on the water, or in the air.  As for man, there is no clear statement as to whether he is to have any future life or what is to become of him, though the custom or jun-shi, or dying with the master, points to a sort of immortality such as the early Greeks and the Iroquois believed in.

It would task the keenest and ablest Shint[=o]ist to deduce or construct a system of theology, or of ethics, or of anthropology from the mass of tradition so full of gaps and discord as that found in the Kojiki, and none has done it.  Nor do the inaccurate, distorted, and often almost wholly factitious translations, so-called, of French and other writers, who make versions which hit the taste of their occidental readers far better than they express the truth, yield the desired information.  Like the end strands of a new spider’s web, the lines of information on most vital points are still “in the air.”

The Ethics of the God-way.

There are no codes of morals inculcated in the god-way, for even its modern revivalists and exponents consider that morals are the invention of wicked people like the Chinese; while the ancient Japanese were pure in thought and act.  They revered the gods and obeyed the Mikado, and that was the chief end of man, in those ancient times when Japan was the world and Heaven was just above the earth.  Not exactly on Paul’s principle of “where there is no law there is no transgression,” but utterly scouting the idea that formulated ethics were necessary for these pure-minded people, the modern revivalists of Shint[=o] teach that all that is “of faith” now is to revere the gods, keep the heart pure, and follow its dictates.[17] The naivete of the representatives of Shint[=o] at Chicago in A.D. 1893, was almost as great as that of the revivalists who wrote when Japan was a hermit nation.