Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/125

Rh nation spends an inordinate amount of time in the national tub; as becomes pecuniarily apparent when you hire a man by the day, or, stranger yet, by the job. You are tempted at times to suppose your toiler continuously either tubbing or teaing. Doubtless such totality is due to emotional exaggeration on your part, but it is beyond prejudice that he soaks in his tub a good working minority of his time.

When it comes to religious matters, it would seem as if this estimable quality were carried to its inevitable defect. For, from a pardonable pastime, bathing here becomes an all-engrossing pursuit. The would-be devotee spends his waking life at little else, and he sleeps less than most men at that. Not only is it his bounden duty to bathe six appointed times in every twenty-four hours, but he should also bathe as often as he may between. The more he bathes the better he becomes.

Now, if he simply soaked in a hot water tub as his profane friends do, this might be merely the ecstatic height of dissipation. But he does nothing of the kind. No gentle parboiling is his portion; perpetual