The Shinto Cult: A Christian Study of the Ancient Religion of Japan

By Milton Spenser Terry

The Shinto Cult is a book by Milton Spenser Terry. It provides a Christian study of the ancient Japanese religion of Shinto; with focus on traditions coupled with specific beliefs.

• Language: English
• Publisher: DigiCat
• Release date: May 29, 2022
• ISBN: 8596547018131

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Milton Spenser Terry

The Shinto Cult: A Christian Study of the Ancient Religion of Japan

EAN 8596547018131

DigiCat, 2022

Contact: [e-mail]

Table of Contents

Cover

Titlepage

THE SHINTO CULT.

SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY.

THE SHINTO CULT.

Table of Contents

1. The Country. In taking up the study of a religion which has never extended beyond the limits of an easily defined territory, we may appropriately first of all take a hasty glance at the geographical outlines of the system we call Shinto, the primitive faith of the people of Japan. To appreciate the geographical position of Japan, one needs to have before him a map of the world. He may then see at a glance how remarkably the three thousand islands of that Empire stretch for some twenty-five hundred miles along the coast of Asia, from Kamchatka on the north to the island of Formosa on the south, which island is crossed by the tropic of Cancer. It may be called the longest and the narrowest country in the world. It looks like an immense sea-serpent, with its northern tail twisting toward the Aleutian Islands, which our Government acquired from Russia in 1867, and its southern head pointing toward the Philippine Islands, which we acquired from Spain in recent years. It seems to guard the whole eastern coast of Asia, and along with China, on the mainland, is suspected and feared by some European diplomats as embodying some sort of a Yellow Peril. It may be that its noteworthy contiguity to our Alaskan possessions at one extremity and our Philippine wards at the other bodes some sort of peril to any Western nation that may hereafter presume to enlarge its dominions in the Orient by force of arms.

Attention has often been called to the fact that the British Isles, in the Atlantic Ocean, just off the northwestern coast of Europe, occupy a corresponding geographical relation to the Western world. The islands themselves are comparatively small, but their measuring line has gone out into all the earth, and their civilization is dominating the world. Asia, on the east of the Eastern hemisphere, is a land of innumerable population; Europe, on the west, is a land of new ideas and of hopeful progress. The United States, resting her Atlantean shoulder on the island-empire of Europe, and her Pacific shoulder on the island-empire of the Orient, may be, in the order of God, a mighty mediator, possessed both of a great population and of new and commanding ideas, and destined to bring about the universal peace, the sound knowledge, and the highest prosperity of the world.

We are told that Japan is a country of diversified beauty. Compassed round about with the vast ocean, yet not far from the Asiatic mainland; supplied also with a wonderful inland sea, and with lakes and rivers and fountains of waters; a land of mountains, and valleys, and broad meadows, and all manner of trees and shrubs and fruits and flowers, and charming landscapes, and all varieties of climate; it is no wonder that the people and their poets have called this group of islands the sun's nest, the country of the sun-goddess, the region between heaven and earth, islands of the congealed drop, the grand land of the eight isles, central land of reed-plains, land of the ears of fresh rice, land of a thousand autumns, and other similar names indicative of manifold excellence.[1]

This island-empire of the Orient is the home of the religious cult called Shinto, a religion which has never traveled nor sought to propagate itself beyond the dominions of Japan. It has never put itself in a hostile attitude toward any other form of religion, either at home or abroad, except when a foreign cult has entered its ancient home and sought to meddle with affairs of State or to interfere with loyalty to the Emperor.

2. Is Shinto a Religion? At a meeting of the Society of Science, held at Tokyo in 1890, the president of the Imperial University expressed the opinion that Shinto should not be regarded as a religion. He believed it to be an essential element in the existing national thought and feeling of Japan, but destitute of the essential qualities of a strictly religious cult. Others have expressed a similar opinion; but we are disposed to think that this judgment arises from an incorrect concept of religion, and a consequent defective definition of the same. A similar denial has been made of the religious character of other cults and systems. Taoism, Confucianism, and even Buddhism have been said to lack the elements essential to a real religion. But if these systems do not constitute a religion for the peoples who accept them, they are in every case their substitute for religion. Any religion or any form of religion may so involve its thought and its practices with philosophical speculation, or with social customs, or with the political management of the State, as to have the appearance of a philosophical or a political system, rather than a form of religion. But, however it may, in such ways, ignore the religious ideas and practices of other systems, if there be no other religious cult among the people, the philosophy, the ethical policy and the customs, which make up this important element of the civilization and the national life, are as truly tantamount to a