Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/34

18 Mikado—with all the irony of fate, since these littérateurs owed their existence to the patronage of those they overthrew. This was the restoration of 1868. Shintō came back as part and parcel of the old. The temples Buddhism had usurped were purified; that is, they were stripped of Buddhist ornament, and handed over again to the Shintō priests. The faith of the nation's springtime entered upon the Indian summer of its life.

This happy state of things was not to last. Buddhism, and especially the great wave of western ideas, proved submerging. From filling one half the government, spiritual affairs were degraded, first to a department, then to a bureau, and then to a sub-bureau. The Japanese upper classes had found a new faith; and Herbert Spencer was its prophet.

But in the nation's heart the Shintō sentiment throbbed on as strong as ever. A Japanese cabinet minister found this out to his cost. In 1887, Mori Arinori, one of the most advanced Japanese new-lights, then minister of state for education, went on a certain occasion to the Shrines of Ise, and studiously treated them with disrespect. It