All the terms which a foreigner might use in speaking of the duties of sovereign and minister, of lord and retainer and of master and servant, are comprehended in the Japanese word, Kun-shin, in which is crystallized but one thought, though it may relate to three grades of society.  The testimony of history and of the language shows, that the feelings which we call loyalty and reverence are always directed upward, while those which we term benevolence and love invariably look downward.

Note herein the difference between the teachings of Christ and those of the Chinese sage.  According to the latter, if there be love in the relation of the master and servant, it is the master who loves, and not the servant who may only reverence.  It would be inharmonious for the Japanese servant to love his master; he never even talks of it.  And in family life, while the parent may love the child, the child is not expected to love the parent but rather to reverence him.  So also the Japanese wife, as in our old scriptural versions, is to “see that she reverence her husband.”  Love (not agape, but eros) is indeed a theme of the poets and of that part of life and of literature which is, strictly speaking, outside of the marriage relation, but the thought that dominates in marital life, is reverence from the wife and benevolence from the husband.  The Christian conception, which requires that a woman should love her husband, does not strictly accord with the Confucian idea.

Christianity has taught us that when a man loves a woman purely and makes her his wife, he should also have reverence for her, and that this element should be an integral part of his love.  Christianity also teaches a reverence for children; and Wordsworth has but followed the spirit of his great master, Christ, when expressing this beautiful sentiment in his melodious numbers.  Such ideas as these, however, are discords in Japanese social life of the old order.  So also the Christian preaching of love to God, sounds outlandish to the men of Chinese mind in the middle or the pupil kingdom, who seem to think that it can only come from the lips of those who have not been properly trained.  To “love God” appears to them as being an unwarrantable patronage of, and familiarity with “Heaven,” or the King of Kings.  The same difficulty, which to-day troubles Christian preachers and translators, existed among the Roman Catholic missionaries three centuries ago.[15] The moulds of thought were not then, nor are they even now, entirely ready for the full truth of Christian revelation.

Suicide Made Honorable.

In the long story of the Honorable Country, there are to be found many shining examples of loyalty, which is the one theme oftenest illustrated in popular fiction and romance.  Its well-attested instances on the crimson thread of Japanese history are more numerous than the beads on many rosaries.  The most famous of all, perhaps, is the episode of the Forty-Seven R[=o]nins, which is a constant favorite in the theatres, and has been so graphically narrated or pictured by scores of native poets, authors, artists, sculptors and dramatists, and told in English by Mitford, Dickens and Grecy.[16]