THE INVENTION OF A NEW RELIGION
BY
B. H. CHAMBERLAIN,
EMERITUS PROFESSOR OF JAPANESE AND PHILOLOGY AT THE IMPERIAL
UNIVERSITY OF TOKYO, JAPAN
1912



The Invention of a New Religion [1]

[Note 1] The writer of this pamphlet could but
skim over a wide subject. For full information see
Volume I. of Mr. J. Murdoch's recently-published
"History of Japan," the only critical work on that
subject existing in the English language.

Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who
held religions to be the invention of priests, have been
scorned as superficial by later investigators. But was there
not something in their view, after all? Have not we, of a
later and more critical day, got into so inveterate a habit of
digging deep that we sometimes fail to see what lies before
our very noses? Modern Japan is there to furnish an example.
The Japanese are, it is true, commonly said to be an
irreligious people. They say so themselves. Writes one
of them, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the
modern educated Japanese man: "I lack a religious nature,
and have never believed in any religion." A score of like
pronouncements might be quoted from other leading men. The