A foreigner, hearing the Japanese translate our word chastity by the term teiso or misao, may imagine that the latter represents mutual obligation and personal purity for man and wife alike, but on looking into the dictionary he will find that teiso means “Womanly duties.”  A circumlocution is needed to express the idea of a chaste man.

Jealousy is a horrible sin, but is always supposed to be a womanish fault, and so an exhibition of folly and weakness.  Therefore, to apply such a term to God—­to say “a jealous God”—­outrages the good sense of a Confucianist,[24] almost as much as the statement that God “cannot lie” did that of the Pundit, who wondered how God could be Omnipotent if He could not lie.

How great the need in Japanese social life of some purifying principle higher than Confucianism can afford, is shown in the little book entitled “The Japanese Bride,"[25] written by a native, and scarcely less in the storm of native criticism it called forth.  Under the system which has ruled Japan for a millennium and a half, divorce has been almost entirely in the hands of the husband, and the document of separation, entitled in common parlance the “three lines and a half,” was invariably written by the man.  A woman might indeed nominally obtain a divorce from her husband, but not actually; for the severance of the marital tie would be the work of the house or relatives, rather than the act of the wife, who was not “a person” in the case.  Indeed, in the olden time a woman was not a person in the eye of the law, but rather a chattel.  The case is somewhat different under the new codes,[26] but the looseness of the marriage tie is still a scandal to thinking Japanese.  Since the breaking up of the feudal system and the disarrangement of the old social and moral standards, the statistics made annually from the official census show that the ratio of divorce to marriage is very nearly as one to three.[27]

The Elder and the Younger Brother.

The Fourth Relation is that of Elder Brother and Younger Brother.  As we have said, foreigners in translating some of the Chinese and Japanese terms used in the system of Confucius are often led into errors by supposing that the Christian conception of family life prevails also in Chinese Asia.  By many writers this relation is translated “brother to brother;” but really in the Japanese language there is no term meaning simply “brother” or “sister,"[28] and a circumlocution is necessary to express the ideas which we convey by these words.  It is always “older brother” or “younger brother,” and “older sister” or “younger sister”—­the male or female “kiyodai” as the case may be.  With us—­excepting in lands where the law of primogeniture still prevails—­all the brothers are practically equal, and it would be considered a violation of Christian righteousness for a parent to show more favor to one child than to another.  In this respect the “wisdom that cometh from