To attempt a just and impartial survey of the religions of Japan may seem a task that might well appall even a life-long Oriental scholar.  Yet it may be that an honest purpose, a deep sympathy and a gladly avowed desire to help the East and the West, the Japanese and the English-speaking people, to understand each other, are not wholly useless in a study of religion, but for our purpose of real value.  These lectures are upon the Morse[1] foundation which has these specifications written out by the founder: 

The general subject of the lectures I desire to be:  “The Relation of the Bible to any of the Sciences, as Geography, Geology, History, and Ethnology, ... and the relation of the facts and truths contained in the Word of God, to the principles, methods, and aims of any of the sciences.”

Now, among the sciences which we must call to our aid are those of geography and geology, by which are conditioned history and ethnology of which we must largely treat; and, most of all, the science of Comparative Religion.

This last is Christianity’s own child.  Other sciences, such as geography and astronomy, may have been born among lands and nations outside of and even before Christendom.  Other sciences, such as geology, may have had their rise in Christian time and in Christian lands, their foundation lines laid and their main processes illustrated by Christian men, which yet cannot be claimed by Christianity as her children bearing her own likeness and image; but the science of Comparative Religion is the direct offspring of the religion of Jesus.  It is a distinctively Christian science.  “It is so because it is a product of Christian civilization, and because it finds its impulse in that freedom of inquiry which Christianity fosters."[2] Christian scholars began the investigations, formulated the principles, collected the materials and reared the already splendid fabric of the science of Comparative Religion, because the spirit of Christ which was in them did signify this.  Jesus bade his disciples search, inquire, discern and compare.  Paul, the greatest of the apostolic Christian college, taught:  “Prove all things; hold fast that which is good.”  In our day one of Christ’s loving followers[3] expressed the spirit of her Master in her favorite motto, “Truth for authority, not authority for truth.”  Well says Dr. James Legge, a prince among scholars, and translator of the Chinese classics, who has added several portly volumes to Professor Max Mueller’s series of the “Sacred Books of the East,” whose face to-day is bronzed and whose hair is whitened by fifty years of service in southern China where with his own hands he baptized six hundred Chinamen:[4]