life. "Though an eagle be starving," says the Japanese proverb, "it will
not eat grain;" and so, while the mass of the people and even the
erudite, were content with ground food--even the chopped straw and husks
of materialistic Confucianism and decayed Buddhism--there were noble
souls who soared upward to exercise their God-given powers, and to seek
nourishment fitted for that human spirit which goeth upward and not
downward, and which, ever in restless discontent, seeks the Infinite.


Protests of Inquiring Spirits.


There is no stronger proof of the true humanity and the innate
god-likeness of the Japanese, of their worthiness to hold and their
inherent power to win a high place among the nations of the earth, than
this longing of a few elect ones for the best that earth could give and
Heaven bestow. We find men in travail of spirit, groping after God if
haply they might find Him, following the ways of the Spirit along lines
different, and in pathways remote, from those laid down by Confucius and
his materialistic commentators, or by Buddha and his parodists or
caricaturists. The story of the philosophers, who mutinied against the
iron clamps and governmentally nourished system of the Séido College
expounders, is yet to be fully told.[12] It behooves some Japanese
scholar to tell it.

How earnest truth-seeking Japanese protested and rebelled against the
economic fallacies, against the political despotism, against the
abominable usurpations, against the false strategies and against the
inherent immoralities of the Tokugawa system, has of late years been set
forth with tantalizing suggestiveness, but only in fragments, by the