Though every form of religion holds something of undying truth, the evolutionist must classify religions. He must regard a monotheistic faith as representing, in the progress of human thought, a very considerable advance upon any polytheistic creed; monotheism signifying the fusion and expansion of countless ghostly beliefs into one vast concept of unseen omnipotent power. And, from the standpoint of psychological evolution, he must of course consider pantheism as an advance upon monotheism, and must further regard agnosticism as an advance upon both. But the value of a creed is necessarily relative, and the question of its worth is to be decided, not by its adaptability to the intellectual developments of a single cultured class, but by its larger emotional relation to the whole society of which it embodies the moral experience. Its value to any other society must depend upon its power of self-adaptation to the ethical experience of that society. We may grant that Roman Catholicism was, by sole virtue of its monotheistic conception, a stage in advance of the primitive ancestor-worship. But it was adapted only to a form of society at [341] which neither Chinese nor Japanese civilization had arrived,--a form of society in which the ancient family had been dissolved, and the religion of filial piety forgotten. Unlike that subtler and incomparably more humane creed of India, which had learned the secret of missionary-success a thousand years before Loyola, the religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,--all the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits,--may simply be considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the repressive measures taken by Iyeyasu and his successors signify sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme danger. It was recognized that the triumph of the foreign religion would involve the total disintegration of society, and the subjection of the empire to foreign domination.