Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/270

248 a distant divine recognition is no reason why it should minimize this intimacy to others. Anteroom admission to the favor of the gods is surely as valuable a privilege as a like reception at the hands of the great ones of the earth; and we all know what lustre in their own eyes such threshold intimacy casts upon the favored few, even to the extent of pretending to make light of it to others. Now this divine intimacy is imposing enough in all conscience when it rests simply on the word of the admitted. How infinitely more so when confirmed by visible action on the part of the gods themselves. An introduction to such peculiar privilege is not thoughtlessly to be given to everybody. It will not do to present profane outsiders to one's gods; still less thus to present one's bosom foe. Such an act is nothing short of sacerdotal suicide.

Yet something still more improbable the Buddhists would have us believe. For they admit getting the gohei from Shintō, and at the same time they assert that they taught that faith the possession cult. If so, then they took three steps to their own destruction, each more trance-like, to say the least,