e, missionaries claim that Christianity is a new
religion, whereas, to my mind, it is an "old, old story," which, if
presented in intelligible words,--that is to say, if expressed in the
vocabulary familiar in the moral development of a people--will find easy
lodgment in their hearts, irrespective of race or nationality.
Christianity in its American or English form--with more of Anglo-Saxon
freaks and fancies than grace and purity of its founder--is a poor scion
to graft on Bushido stock. Should the propagator of the new faith uproot
the entire stock, root and branches, and plant the seeds of the Gospel
on the ravaged soil? Such a heroic process may be possible--in Hawaii,
where, it is alleged, the church militant had complete success in
amassing spoils of wealth itself, and in annihilating the aboriginal
race: such a process is most decidedly impossible in Japan--nay, it is
a process which Jesus himself would never have employed in founding his
kingdom on earth. It behooves us to take more to heart the following
words of a saintly man, devout Christian and profound scholar:--"Men
have divided the world into heathen and Christian, without considering
how much good may have been hidden in the one, or how much evil may
have been mingled with the other. They have compared the best part of
themselves with the worst of their neighbors, the ideal of Christianity
with the corruption of Greece or the East. They have not aimed at
impartiality, but have been contented to accumulate all that could be
said in praise of their own, and in dispraise of other forms of
religion."[34]

[Footnote 34: Jowett, _Sermons on Faith and Doctrine_, II.]

But, whatever may be the error committed by individuals, there is little
doubt that the fundamental principle of the religion they profess is a
power which we must take into account in reckoning

THE FUTURE OF BUSHIDO,

whose days seem to be already numbered. Ominous signs are in the air,
that betoken its future. Not only signs, but redoubtable forces are at
work to threaten it.

Few historical comparisons can be more judiciously made than between the
Chivalry of Europe and the Bushido of Japan, and, if history repeats
itself, it certainly will do with the fate of the latter what it did
with that of the former. The particular and local causes for the decay
of Chivalry which St. Palaye gives, have, of course, little application
to Japanese conditions; but the larger and more general cause