delayed. Despite its apparent interest in, and harmony with,
contemporaneous statements of science, it does not hold the men of
thought, or those who long for the spiritual purification and moral
elevation of Japan.

Are the Japanese eager for reform? Do they possess that quality of
emotion in which a tormenting sense of sin, and a burning desire for
self-surrender to holiness, are ever manifest?

Frankly and modestly, we give our opinion. We think not. The average
Japanese man has not come to that self-consciousness, that searching of
heart, that self-seeing of sin in the light of a Holy God's countenance
which the gospel compels. Yet this is exactly what the Japanese need.
Only Christ's gospel can give it.

The average man of culture in Dai Nippon has to-day no religion. He is
waiting for one. What shall be the issue, in the contest between a faith
that knows no personal God, no Creator, no atonement, no gospel of
salvation from sin, and the gospel which bids man seek and know the
great First Cause, as Father and Friend, and proclaims that this
Infinite Friend seeks man to bless him, to bestow upon him pardon and
holiness and to give him earthly happiness and endless life? Between one
religion which teaches personality in God and in man, and another which
offers only a quagmire of impersonality wherein a personal god and an
individual soul exist only as the jack-lights of the marsh, mere
phosphorescent gleams of decay, who can fail to choose? Of the two
faiths, which shall be victor?