Page:Things Japanese (1905).djvu/345

Rh actually happened in this land of realised improbabilities. But 1888 witnessed a reaction in every department of Japanese life and thought. Angry with Europe for the recent failure of treaty revision, the leading classes then turned their backs on all such European things as appeared to them non-essential,—not on the electric light of course, or on banking, or surgery, or anything of evident material utility, but on European dress, European cookery, European amusements, European ideals. Christianity, being alien and non-utilitarian, has come in for its share of this cold wave. While the population grows rapidly, the number of the converts grows slowly. This spirit, too, has changed, their regard for the missionaries has cooled, they desire to walk alone. Not only so:—they wish to Japonise Christianity itself, in essence as well as in outward form, and seem inclined to throw over board even that minimum of dogma on which the Protestant missionaries feel bound to insist. Evidently a modern Bossuet would find in Japan materials for a new chapter on the Variations of Protestantism within the space of a single generation.

Prophesying is no safe occupation nowadays. Nevertheless, we hazard a guess to the effect that in the future the Protestants of Japan will be occupied with questions of morals and practice—the temperance question, for instance, and Sunday observance—rather than with subtle doctrinal theories, the Japanese mind being too essentially unspeculative for the fine distinctions of the theologians to have any charm for it, much less for it to seek to split new hairs for itself. The failure of Buddhist metaphysical abstractions to take any hold of the national sympathies, is a finger-post in history pointing to what may be expected in the future. People will never greatly excite themselves about beliefs that sit lightly on them; and Japanese religious beliefs have always sat lightly. Has not the whole attitude of the Far-Eastern mind with regard to the supernatural been aptly described as one of "politeness towards possibilities?" Doubtless this natural disinclination to a spiritual religion on the part of the Chinese and Japanese is aided and abetted by special local causes. There