words of Kingsley really embody the central idea in her training. Of course the being, formed by such training only, must be protected by society; and by the old Japanese society she was protected. Exceptions did not affect the rule. What I mean is that she was able to be purely herself, within certain limits of emotional etiquette, in all security. Her success in life was made to depend on her power to win affection by gentleness, obedience, kindliness;--not the affection merely of a husband, but of the husband's parents and grandparents, and brothers-in-law and sisters-in-law,--in short of all the members of a strange household. Thus to succeed required angelic goodness and patience; and the Japanese woman realized at least the ideal of a Buddhist angel. A being working only for others, thinking only for others, happy only in making pleasure for others,--a being incapable of unkindness, incapable of selfishness, incapable of acting contrary to her own inherited sense of right,--and in spite of this softness and gentleness ready, at any moment, to lay down her life, to [366] sacrifice everything at the call of duty: such was the character of the Japanese woman. Most strange may seem the combination, in this child-soul, of gentleness and force, tenderness and courage,--yet the explanation is not far to seek. Stronger within her than wifely affection or parental affection or even maternal affection,--stronger than any womanly emotion, was the moral conviction born of her great faith. This religious quality of character can be found among ourselves only within the shadow of cloisters, where it is cultivated at the expense of all else; and the Japanese woman has been therefore compared to a Sister of Charity. But she had to be very much more than a Sister of Charity,--daughter-in-law and wife and mother, and to fulfil without reproach the multiform duties of her triple part. Rather might she be compared to the Greek type of noble woman,--to Antigone, to Alcestis. With the Japanese woman, as formed by the ancient training, each act of life was an act of faith: her existence was a religion, her home a temple, her every word and thought ordered by the law of the cult of the dead.... This wonderful type is not extinct--though surely doomed to disappear. A human creature so shaped for the service of gods and men that every beat of her heart is duty, that every drop of her blood is moral feeling, were not less out of place in the future world of competitive selfishness, than an angel in hell. [367] THE SHINTO REVIVAL