Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 5.djvu/185

 reverenced after death. Much of the vogue so speedily attained and so steadily retained by Confucianism is doubtless due to the subordinate place assigned to supernatural religion in that system. Confucianism, too, owing to the note of feudalism that sounds through its philosophy, has been found to be more or less out of harmony with the spirit of Occidental civilisation, and is destined, in its turn, to pass into the oblivion where so many Oriental systems lie buried. But through fourteen centuries it worked steadily and powerfully to turn the mind of educated Japan from transcendental subtleties and religious mysticism to a conviction that the only true and rational creed is one which subjects the human faculties to no excessive strain, nor asks men to accept, on the alleged authority of supernatural revelation, propositions lying wholly beyond the range of mortal intelligence. Buddhism, in the comparatively bright and comfortable garments with which Japanese genius clothed it, is the faith of the masses, but the scholar proposes to himself a simpler creed, an essentially work-a-day system of ethics. To be moral, honest, and upright; to be guided by reason and not by passion; to be faithful to friends and benefactors; to abstain from meanness and selfishness in all forms; to be prepared to sacrifice everything to country and king, — that is the ideal of the cultured mind, and in the pursuit of it no priestly guidance is considered necessary. If a Japanese be asked to