Page:Occult Japan - Lovell.djvu/39

Rh skeleton-like. With a barn of a building for temple, a scant set of paraphernalia, and priests who are laymen most of the time, its appearance certainly leaves something to be desired. For in all save good Puritan souls, the religious idea craves sensuous setting. Feeling lies at the root of faith, and a fine mass at the root of feeling. Sense may not be vital to religion, but incense is.

II.

In but one thing is Shintō patently rich—in gods. It has as much to worship as it has little to worship with. It has more gods than its devotees know what to do with. From the Goddess of the Sun to the gods of rice and agriculture, few things in heaven or earth stand unrepresented in its catholic pantheon. Biblical biography puts the number roundly at eighty myriads, but in Japanese speech "eighty" and "myriad" are neither of them mathematical terms, the one being a mystic number and the other a conventional confession of arithmetical incompetency; both expressions being rigorously rendered in English by the phrase "no end."