ry, among the educated Japanese, as good
as dead. Modern Confucianism and the revival of Chinese learning,
resulted in eighteenth century scepticism and in nineteenth century
agnosticism.

The New Buddhism.

In our day and time, Japanese Buddhism, in the presence of aggressive
Christianity, is out of harmony with the times, and the needs of
forty-one millions of awakened and inquiring people; and there are deep
searchings of heart. Politically disestablished and its landed
possessions sequestrated by the government, it has had, since 1868, a
history, first of depression and then of temporary revival. Now, amid
much mechanical and external activity, the employment of the press, the
organization of charity, of summer schools of "theology," and of young
men's and other associations copied from the Christians, it is
endeavoring to keep New Japan within its pale and to dictate the future.
It seeks to utilize the old bottles for the new vintage.

There is, however, a movement discernible which may be called the New
Buddhism, and has not only new wine but new wineskins. It is democratic,
optimistic, empirical or practical; it welcomes women and children; it
is hospitable to science and every form of truth. It is catholic in
spirit and has little if any of the venom of the old Buddhist
controvertists. It is represented by earnest writers who look to natural
and spiritual means, rather than to external and mechanical methods. As
a whole, we may say that Japanese Buddhism is still strong to-day in its
grip upon the people. Though unquestionably moribund, its death will be
delayed. Despite its apparent interest in, and harmony with,
contemporaneous statements of science, it does not hold the men of
thought, or those who long for the spiritual purification and moral
elevation of Japan.

Are the Japanese eager for reform? Do they possess that quality of
emotion in which a tormenting sense of sin, and a burning desire for
self-surrender to holiness, are ever manifest?

Frankly and modestly, we give our opinion. We think not. The average
Japanese man has not come to that self-consciousness, that searching of
heart, that self-seeing of sin in the light of a Holy God's countenance
which the gospel compels. Yet this is exactly what the Japanese need.
Only Christ's gospel can give it.

The average man of culture in Dai Nippon has to-day no religion. He is
waiting for one. What shall be the issue, in the contest between a faith