this is not the least true of religious ones, that,
starting from their birthplace, pass out to stir others, who have but
humanity in common with those who professed them first. Like the ripples
in the pool, they leave their initial converts to sink back again into
comparative quiescence, as they advance to throw into sudden tremors
hordes of outer barbarians. In both of the great religions in question
this wave propagation has been most marked, only the direction it
took differed. Christianity went westward; Buddhism travelled east.
Proselytes in Asia Minor, Greece, and Italy find counterparts in
Eastern India, Burmah, and Thibet. Eventually the taught surpassed their
teachers both in zeal and numbers. Jerusalem and Benares at last gave
place to Rome and Lassa as sacerdotal centres. Still the movement
journeyed on. Popes and Lhamas remained where their predecessors
had founded sees, but the tide of belief surged past them in its
irresistible advance. Farther yet from where each faith began are to
be found to-day the greater part of its adherents. The home that the
Western hemisphere seems to promise to the one, the extreme Orient
affords the other. As Roman Catholicism now looks to America for its
strength, so Buddhism to-day finds its worshippers chiefly in China and
Japan.

But though the Japanese may be said to be all Buddhists, Buddhist is by
no means all that they are. At the time of their adoption of the great
Indian faith, the Japanese were already in possession of a system of
superstition which has held its own to this day. In fact, as the state
religion of the land, it has just experienced a revival, a
regalvanizing of its old-time energy, at the hands of some of the native
archaeologists. Its sacred mirror, held up to Nature, has been burnished
anew. Formerly this body of belief was the national faith, the Mikado,
the direct descendant of the early gods, being its head on earth. His
reinstatement to temporal power formed a very fitting first step toward
reinvesting the cult with its former prestige; a curious instance,
indeed, of a religious revival due to archaeological, not to religious
zeal.

This cult is the mythological inheritance of the whole eastern seaboard
of Asia, from Siam to Kamtchatka. In Japan it is called Shintoism. The
word "Shinto" means literally "the way of the gods," and the letter
of its name is a true exponent of the spirit of the belief. For its
scriptures are rather an itinerary of