times before the rise of Mikadoism, must be carefully distinguished from
the politico-ecclesiasticism which the system called Shint[=o] reveals
and demands. The early religion, first in the hands of politicians and
later under the pens and voices of writers and teachers at the Imperial
Court, became something very different from its original form. As surely
as K[=o]b[=o] later captured Shint[=o], making material for Buddhism out
of it and overlaying it in Riy[=o]bu, so the Yamato men made political
capital out of their own religion and that of the subject tribes. The
divine sovereign of Japan and his political church did exactly what the
state churches of Europe, both pagan and Christian, have done before and
since the Christian era.

Further, in studying the "Kojiki," we must remember that the sacred
writings sprang out of the religion, and that the system was not an
evolution from the book. Customs, ritual, faith and prayer existed long
before they were written about or recorded in ink. Moreover, the
philosophy came later than the practice, the deeds before the myths, and
the joy and terror of the visible universe before the cosmogony or
theogony, while the book-preface was probably written last of all.

The sun was first, and then came the wonder, admiration and worship of
men. The personification and pedigree of the sun were late figments. To
connect their ancestors with the sun-goddess and the heavenly gods, was
a still later enterprise of the "Mikado reverencers" of this earlier
time. Both the god-way in its early forms and Shint[=o] in its later
development, were to them political as well as ecclesiastical institutes
of dogma. Both the religion which they themselves brought and cultivated
and the aboriginal religion which the Yamato men found, were used as
engines in the making of Mikadoism, which is the heart of Shint[=o].