a whole community, when they adopted literary methods which
would now, in our comparatively stable days, be branded as
fraudulent. They simply could not help themselves. The
pressing need of constructing a national polity for the
present on the only basis then possible--Yahwe worship--FORCED
them into falsifying the past. The question was one of life
and death for the Jewish nationality.

* * *

Europeans there are in Japan--Europeanised Japanese likewise--
who feel outraged by the action of the Japanese bureaucracy in
the matter of the new cult, with all the illiberal and
obscurantist measures which it entails. That is natural. We
modern Westerners love individual liberty, and the educated
among us love to let the sunlight of criticism into every nook
and cranny of every subject. Freedom and scientific accuracy
are our gods. But Japanese officialdom acts quite naturally,
after its kind, in not allowing the light to be let in,
because the roots of the faith it has planted need darkness
in which to grow and spread. No religion can live which is
subjected to critical scrutiny.

Thus also are explained the rigours of the Japanese
bureaucracy against the native liberals, who, in its eyes,
appear, not simply as political opponents, but as traitors
to the chosen people--sacrilegious heretics defying the
authority of the One and Only True Church.

"But," you will say, "this indignation must be mere pretence.