Protestant Christianity came to Japan with the beginning of the new era, and has been preached with much zeal and moderate success. For a time it seemed destined to sweep the land even more astonishingly than did Romanism in the sixteenth century. But in 1888 an anti-foreign reaction began in every department of Japanese life and thought which has put a decided check on the progress of Christian missions. This must suffice for our historical review of the religious life of the Japanese. Were we to forget Japan's long and repeated isolations, and also to ignore fluctuations of belief and of other religious phenomena in other lands, we might say, as many do, that the Japanese have inherently shallow and changeable religious convictions. But remembering these facts, and recalling the persecutions of Buddhists by each other, of Christianity by the state, and knowing to-day many earnest, self-sacrificing and persistent Christians, I am convinced that such a judgment is mistaken. There are other and sufficient reasons to account for this appearance of changeableness in religion. I close this chapter with a single observation on the religious history just outlined. Bearing in mind the great changes that have come over Japanese religious thinking and forms of religion I ask if religious phenomena are the expressions of the race nature, as some maintain, and if this nature is inherent and unchangeable, how are such profound changes to be accounted for? If the religious character of the Japanese people is inherent, how is it conceivable that they should so easily adopt foreign religions, even to the exclusion of their own native religion, as did those who became Buddhist or Confucian or Christian? I conclude from these facts, and they are paralleled in the history of many other peoples, that even religious characteristics are not dependent on biological, but are wholly dependent on social evolution. It seems to me capable of the clearest proof that the religious phenomena of any age are dependent on the general development of the intellect, on the ruling ideas, and on the entire conditions of the civilization of the age rather than on brain structure or essential race nature. XXVII SOME RELIGIOUS CONCEPTIONS