Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 1.djvu/112

 source of contamination, rendering a man responsible to the nearest house or hamlet, and involving elaborate rites of cleansing. It resulted that the companions of a man who fell sick by the roadside or was drowned, used generally to fly precipitately without waiting to succour or inter him, the promptings of charity and of fellowship being thus subserved to the dictates of unreasoning superstition. In short, the nation offered a striking example of well-developed material civilisation side by side with most rudimentary morality. A religion was wanted. The Shintô cult, after long and uninterrupted trial, a trial lasting for more than eleven hundred years, had proved itself essentially deficient in the guiding influences of a creed. Its want of any code of sanctions and vetoes, its indifference to a future state, its negative rules of conduct, its exaltation of deities whose powers were exercised for temporal purposes only—all these attributes deprived it of elevating effect upon the masses. Confucianism was powerless to correct these evils. It appealed to the intellect and left sentiment untouched. A religion was wanted, and it came in the form of Buddhism.