he
confessed to a world of romance in old Romanism, the Greek Church, he
thought, had a better chance of life. Russia seemed the coming race, a
Russian Mass would one day be sung in St. Peter's, and Cossack soldiers
would wait at Stamboul in the reconsecrated Basilica of Justinian for
the apparition of that phantom priest destined to finish the Mass,
interrupted by the swords of the Janizaries of Mahomet II.

In spite of frequently declaring himself a radical, the trend of Hearn's
mind was distinctly conservative. Old beliefs handed down from century
to century, old temples sanctified for generations, old emotions that
had moulded the life of the people, had for him supreme attraction. When
he arrived at Matsue and found an Arcadian state of things, a happy,
contented, industrious people, and an artistic development of a
remarkable kind, the girl he married, also, Setsu Koizumi, having been
brought up in the tenets of the ancient faith, it was a foregone
conclusion that he should endeavour to harmonise Shintoism and Buddhism
with the philosophy propounded by his high-priest, Herbert Spencer.
Following the lead of his master, he committed himself to the statement
that "ancestor worship was the root of all religion." Cut off from
communication with outside opinion, he did not know how hotly this idea
had been contested, Frederic Harrison, amongst others, asserting that
the worship of natural objects--not spirit or ancestor worship--was the
beginning of the religious sentiment in man.

It was of the nature of Hearn's mind that he should have taken up and
clung to this Spencerian idea of ghost-cult, the religion of the dead.
From his earliest childhood the "ghostly" had always haunted him. Even
the name of the Holy Ghost as taught him in his childish catechism was
invested with a vague reverential feeling of uncanny, ghostly
influences. When therefore in the "Synthetic Philosophy" he found
Spencer declaring that ancestor worship, the influence of spirits or
ghosts, was the foundation of all religion, he subscribed to the same
idea. "The real religion of Japan," he says in his essay on the ancient
cult, "the religion still professed in one form or other by the entire
nation, is that cult which has been the foundation of all civilised
religion and of all civilised society, 'Ancestor worship.' Patriotism
belongs to it, filial power depends upon it, family love is rooted in
it, loyalty is based upon it. The soldier who, to mak