and then you will never wander from the way.' How this spiritual self-
culture may best be obtained, the same great expounder has stated with
almost equal brevity: 'Devotion to the memory of ancestors is the
mainspring of all virtues. No one who discharges his duty to them will
ever be disrespectful to the Gods or to his living parents. Such a man
will be faithful to his prince, loyal to his friends, and kind and
gentle with his wife and children.' [7]

How far are these antique beliefs removed from the ideas of the
nineteenth century? Certainly not so far that we can afford to smile at
them. The faith of the primitive man and the knowledge of the most
profound psychologist may meet in strange harmony upon the threshold of
the same ultimate truth, and the thought of a child may repeat the
conclusions of a Spencer or a Schopenhauer. Are not our ancestors in
very truth our Kami? Is not every action indeed the work of the Dead who
dwell within us? Have not our impulses and tendencies, our capacities
and weaknesses, our heroisms and timidities, been created by those
vanished myriads from whom we received the all-mysterious bequest of
Life? Do we still think of that infinitely complex Something which is
each one of us, and which we call EGO, as 'I' or as 'They'? What is our
pride or shame but the pride or shame of the Unseen in that which They
have made?--and what our Conscience but the inherited sum of countless
dead experiences with varying good and evil? Nor can we hastily reject
the Shinto thought that all the dead become gods, while we respect the
convictions of those strong souls of to-day who proclaim the divinity of
man.

4

Shino ancestor-worship, no doubt, like all ancestor-worship, was