CHAPTER XIV
RELIGION
I. Bushido—The Moral ideas of Japan
BY PROFESSOR INAZO NITOBE
The straight and narrow way which Christ enjoined upon His followers indicates the moral path which each of us must observe in order to lead a blameless, consistent, and individual career. But the instant we try to survey the moral system of a whole people or race we are confronted, not by a single straight path, but by a vast plain, as it were, stretching from a dim light, far in the distance, with green, graceful hills skirting its base, to the wide plains dotted here with primeval forests, and there with gardens of daintiest flowers, and cut up by manifold paths of various breadth running in seemingly contradictory directions. How one is bewildered by a sight like this! How often one despairs of taking an intelligent view of an alien system of thought, moral or religious, and exclaims, 'This people has no morals,' or 'This race is superstitious,' and, so saying, thanks his little sky that he is better than his neighbours! But pharisaism wanes before the growth of broader sympathies and larger knowledge. Where we once only saw chaos we now catch glimpses of order.
'That way
Over the mountain, which who stands upon,
Is apt to doubt if it be indeed a road;
While if he views it from the waste itself,
Up goes the line there, plain from base to brow,
Not vague, mistakable! What's a break or two
Seen from the unbroken desert either side?
And then (to bring in fresh philosophy),
What if the breaks themselves should prove at last
The most consummate of contrivances
To train a man's eye, teach him what is faith?'
Many others than Browning have felt the same, and only the most thoughtless are denied the sight of a road threading the apparent waste. It is quite a customary remark of foreign tourists that Japanese life is as singularly lacking in morals
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