falsifying the past. The
question was one of life and death for the Jewish nationality.

*****

Europeans there are in Japan--Europeanised Japanese likewise--who feel
outraged by the action of the Japanese bureaucracy in the matter of
the new cult, with all the illiberal and obscurantist measures which it
entails. That is natural. We modern Westerners love individual liberty,
and the educated among us love to let the sunlight of criticism into
every nook and cranny of every subject. Freedom and scientific accuracy
are our gods. But Japanese officialdom acts quite naturally, after its
kind, in not allowing the light to be let in, because the roots of
the faith it has planted need darkness in which to grow and spread. No
religion can live which is subjected to critical scrutiny.

Thus also are explained the rigours of the Japanese bureaucracy against
the native liberals, who, in its eyes, appear, not simply as political
opponents, but as traitors to the chosen people--sacrilegious heretics
defying the authority of the One and Only True Church.

"But," you will say, "this indignation must be mere pretence. Not even
officials can be so stupid as to believe in things which they have
themselves invented." We venture to think that you are wrong here.
People can always believe that which it is greatly to their interest to
believe. Thousands of excellent persons in our own society cling to
the doctrine of a future life on no stronger evidence. It is enormously
important to the Japanese ruling class that the mental attitude sketched
above should become universal among their countrymen. Accordingly, they
achieve the apparently impossible. "We believe in it," said one of
them to us recently--"we believe in it, although we know that it is
not true." Tertullian said nearly the same thing, and no one has ever
doubted HIS sincerity.

End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of The Invention of a New Religion, by
Basil Hall Chamberlain

*** END OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION ***

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