if there be love in the
relation of the master and servant, it is the master who loves, and not
the servant who may only reverence. It would be inharmonious for the
Japanese servant to love his master; he never even talks of it. And in
family life, while the parent may love the child, the child is not
expected to love the parent but rather to reverence him. So also the
Japanese wife, as in our old scriptural versions, is to "see that she
_reverence_ her husband." Love (not _agape_, but _eros_) is indeed a
theme of the poets and of that part of life and of literature which is,
strictly speaking, outside of the marriage relation, but the thought
that dominates in marital life, is reverence from the wife and
benevolence from the husband. The Christian conception, which requires
that a woman should love her husband, does not strictly accord with the
Confucian idea.

Christianity has taught us that when a man loves a woman purely and
makes her his wife, he should also have reverence for her, and that this
element should be an integral part of his love. Christianity also
teaches a reverence for children; and Wordsworth has but followed the
spirit of his great master, Christ, when expressing this beautiful
sentiment in his melodious numbers. Such ideas as these, however, are
discords in Japanese social life of the old order. So also the Christian
preaching of love to God, sounds outlandish to the men of Chinese mind
in the middle or the pupil kingdom, who seem to think that it can only
come from the lips of those who have not been properly trained. To "love
God" appears to them as being an unwarrantable patronage of, and
familiarity with "Heaven," or the King of Kings. The same difficulty,
which to-day troubles Christian preachers and translators, existed among
the Roman Catholic missionaries three centuries ago.[15] The moulds of
thought were not then, nor are they even now, entirely ready for the
full truth of Christian revelation.

Suicide Made Honorable.

In the long story of the Honorable Country, there are to be found many
shining examples of loyalty, which is the one theme oftenest illustrated
in popular fiction and romance. Its well-attested instances on the
crimson thread of Japanese history are more numerous than the beads on
many rosaries. The most famous of all, perhaps, is the episode of the
Forty-Seven R[=o]nins, which is a constant favorite in the theatres, and
has been so graphically narrated or pictured