Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea and land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have done, there is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a melancholy responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and warm human feel, which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot teach to the Oriental as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory of projectiles.  That we have groped for the way of right conduct and agonized over the soul betokens our spiritual endowment.  Though we have strayed often and far from righteousness, the voices of the seers have always been raised, and we have harked back to the bidding of conscience.  The colossal fact of our history is that we have made the religion of Jesus Christ our religion.  No matter how dark in error and deed, ours has been a history of spiritual struggle and endeavour.  We are pre-eminently a religious race, which is another way of saying that we are a right-seeking race.

“What do you think of the Japanese?” was asked an American woman after she had lived some time in Japan.  “It seems to me that they have no soul,” was her answer.

This must not be taken to mean that the Japanese is without soul.  But it serves to illustrate the enormous difference between their souls and this woman’s soul.  There was no feel, no speech, no recognition.  This Western soul did not dream that the Eastern soul existed, it was so different, so totally different.

Religion, as a battle for the right in our sense of right, as a yearning and a strife for spiritual good and purity, is unknown to the Japanese.

Measured by what religion means to us, the Japanese is a race without religion.  Yet it has a religion, and who shall say that it is not as great a religion as ours, nor as efficacious?  As one Japanese has written: 

“Our reflection brought into prominence not so much the moral as the national consciousness of the individual. . . .  To us the country is more than land and soil from which to mine gold or reap grain—­it is the sacred abode of the gods, the spirit of our forefathers; to us the Emperor is more than the Arch Constable of a Reichsstaat, or even the Patron of a Kulturstaat; he is the bodily representative of heaven on earth, blending in his person its power and its mercy.”

The religion of Japan is practically a worship of the State itself.  Patriotism is the expression of this worship.  The Japanese mind does not split hairs as to whether the Emperor is Heaven incarnate or the State incarnate.  So far as the Japanese are concerned, the Emperor lives, is himself deity.  The Emperor is the object to live for and to die for.  The Japanese is not an individualist.  He has developed national consciousness instead of moral consciousness.  He is not interested in his own moral welfare except in so far as it is the welfare of the State.  The honour of the individual,