He made a grand beginning.  He is unquestionably the founder of the school of Pure Shint[=o].  He died in 1736.  His successor and pupil was Mabuchi (1697-1769), who claimed direct descent from that god which in the form of a colossal crow had guided the first chief of the Yamato tribe as he led his invaders through the country to found the line of Mikados.  After Mabuchi came Motooeri (1730-1801) a remarkable scholar and critic, who, with erudition and acuteness, analyzed the ancient literature and showed what were Chinese or imported elements and what was of native origin.  He summarized the principles of the ancient religion, reasserted and illuminated with amazing learning and voluminous commentary the archaic documents, expounded and defended the ancient cosmogony, and in the usual style of Japanese polemics preached anew the doctrines of Shint[=o].  With wonderful naivete and enthusiasm, Motooeri taught that Japan was the first part of the earth created, and that it is therefore The Land of the Gods, the Country of the Holy Spirits.  The stars were created from the muck which fell from the spear of Izanagi as he thrust it into the warm earth, while the other countries were formed by the spontaneous consolidation of the foam of the sea.  Morals were invented by the Chinese because they were an immoral people, but in Japan there is no necessity for any system of morals, as every Japanese acts aright if he only consults his own heart.  The duty of a good Japanese consists in obeying the Mikado, without questioning whether his commands are right or wrong.  The Mikado is god and vicar of all the gods, hence government and religion are the same, the Mikado being the centre of Church and State, which are one.  Did the foreign nations know their duty they would at once hasten to pay tribute to the Son of Heaven in Ki[=o]to.

It is needless here to dwell upon the tremendous power of Shint[=o] as a political system, especially when wedded with the forces, generated in the minds of the educated Japanese by modern Confucianism.  The Chinese ethical system, expanded into a philosophy as fascinating as the English materialistic school of to-day, entered Japan contemporaneously with the revival of the Way of the Gods and of native learning.  In full rampancy of their vigor, in the seventeenth century these two systems began that generation of national energy, which in the eighteenth century was consolidated and which in the nineteenth century, though unknown and unsuspected by Europeans or Americans, was all ready for phenomenal manifestation and tremendous eruption, even while Perry’s fleet was bearing the olive branch to Japan.  As we all know, this consolidation of forces from the inside, on meeting, not with collision but with union, the exterior forces of western civilization, formed a resultant in the energies which have made New Japan.

The Great Purification of 1870.