Page:Shinto, the Way of the Gods - Aston - 1905.djvu/83

Rh Fetish worship of this kind is a later and degenerate form of religion, and must not be confounded with the worship of the great nature-deities.

Some artificial inanimate objects of worship are not shintai, but are worshipped for their own sakes as helpers of humanity. The fire-place is honoured as a deity. Potters at the present day pay respect to their bellows, which are allowed one day of rest annually, and have offerings made them. The superstitious Japanese housewife still, on the 12th day of the 2nd month, gives her needles a holiday, laying them down on their side and making them little offerings of cakes, &c.

The absence of idols from Shinto is not owing, as in Judaism and Islam, to a reaction against the evils caused by the use of anthropomorphic pictures and images, but to the low artistic development of the Japanese nation before the awakening impulse was received from China. It indicated weakness rather than strength. Much of the vagueness which characterizes the Japanese conceptions of their Gods would have been avoided by a freer use of images. In principle the image and the metaphor are the same. There is no more harm in representing a God, pictorially or in sculpture, as an old man than there is in addressing him as Father, though practically a wide experience shows that the common people do not stop here in either case. There is a strong tendency to debase religion by attributing special virtue to the particular physical object of devotion, or even to forget that there is a God of which it is only a very imperfect symbol.

The Infinite.—Max Müller says that without the faculty of apprehending the Infinite there can be no religion. In that case Shinto is not a religion. The Gods are not