average, even educated, European strikes the average educated
Japanese as strangely superstitious, unaccountably occupied
with supra-mundane matters. The Japanese simply cannot be
brought to comprehend how a "mere parson" such as the Pope, or
even the Archbishop of Canterbury, occupies the place he does
in politics and society. Yet this same agnostic Japan is
teaching us at this very hour how religions are sometimes
manufactured for a special end--to subserve practical worldly
purposes.

Mikado-worship and Japan-worship--for that is the new
Japanese religion--is, of course, no spontaneously generated
phenomenon. Every manufacture presupposes a material out of
which it is made, every present a past on which it rests.
But the twentieth-century Japanese religion of loyalty and
patriotism is quite new, for in it pre-existing ideas have
been sifted, altered, freshly compounded, turned to new uses,
and have found a new centre of gravity. Not only is it new,
it is not yet completed; it is still in process of being
consciously or semi-consciously put together by the official
class, in order to serve the interests of that class, and,
incidentally, the interests of the nation at large. The
Japanese bureaucracy is a body greatly to be admired. It
includes most of the foremost men of the nation. Like the
priesthood in later Judaea, to some extent like the Egyptian
and Indian priesthoods, it not only governs, but aspires to
lead in intellectual matters. It has before it a complex task.
On the one hand, it must make good to the outer world the new
claim that Japan differs in no essential way from the nations
of the West, unless, indeed, it be by way of superiority. On