Reverently adoring the great god of the two palaces of Ise, in the first place, the eight hundred myriads of celestial gods, the eight hundred myriads of terrestrial gods, all the fifteen hundred myriads of gods to whom are consecrated the great and small temples in all provinces, all islands and all places of the Great Land of Eight Islands, the fifteen hundreds of myriads of gods whom they cause to serve them, and the gods of branch palaces and branch temples, and Sohodo no kami, whom I have invited to the shrine set up on this divine shelf, and to whom I offer praises day by day, I pray with awe that they will deign to correct the unwitting faults, which, heard and seen by them, I have committed, and blessing and favoring me according to the powers which they severally wield, cause me to follow the divine example, and to perform good works in the Way.

Shint[=o] Left in a State of Arrested Development.

Thus from the emperor to the humblest believer, the god-way is founded on ancestor worship, and has had grafted upon its ritual system nature worship, even to phallicism.[29] In one sense it is a self-made religion of the Japanese.  Its leading characteristics are seen in the traits of the normal Japanese character of to-day.  Its power for good and evil may be traced in the education of the Japanese through many centuries.  Knowing Shint[=o], we to a large degree know the Japanese, their virtues and their failings.

What Shint[=o] might have become in its full evolution had it been left alone, we cannot tell.  Whether in the growth of the nation and without the pressure of Buddhism, Confucianism or other powerful influences from outside, the scattered and fragmentary mythology might have become organized into a harmonious system, or codes of ethics have been formulated, or the doctrines of a future life and the idea of a Supreme Being with personal attributes have been conceived and perfected, are questions the discussion of which may seem to be vain.  History, however, gives no uncertain answer as to what actually did take place.  We do but state what is unchallenged fact, when we say, that after commitment to writing of the myths, poems and liturgies which may be called the basis of Shint[=o], there came a great flood of Chinese and Buddhistic literature and a tremendous expansion of Buddhist missionary activity, which checked further literary growth of the kami system.  These prepared the way for the absorption of the indigenous into the foreign cultus under the form called by an enthusiastic emperor, Riy[=o]bu Shint[=o], or the “two-fold divine doctrine.”  Of this, we shall speak in another lecture.