It is not possible to understand the actual progress made in Japan in improving the condition of women, without some consideration of the effect that Christian thought and Christian lives have had on the thought and lives of the modern Japanese. If Japanese women are ever to be raised to the measure of opportunity accorded to women in Christian countries, it can only be through the growth of Christianity in their own country, and for that reason a study of that growth is pertinent to a study of their condition. The past ten years in Japan have been discouraging to the missionaries in many ways, and it is not unusual to hear from the less hopeful of them the statement that their work has been at a standstill, or even going backward, during that time. The statistics of missionary effort show a steady, though slight, increase in the number of professing Christians, but if the sum total of the results of missionary effort were the number of converts made, it might, perhaps, be doubtful whether the money spent on missions in Japan might not be better turned to other purposes. There are now in Japan, of Christians of all sects, Protestant, and Roman and Greek Catholic, 121,000, or about one half of one per cent. of the total population of the country; but the influence of these Christians as leaders of thought is out of all proportion to their number. Christian men are found in the Diet, in the army and navy, in the universities and colleges, and in the newspaper offices, in a proportion far beyond their ratio to the total population, exerting their influence in many ways for the uplifting of the nation to loftier moral ideals. The proportion of Christian men and women in the government schools with which I have been connected is rather surprising. In the Higher Normal School, training young women to go out into the whole country as teachers, the proportion of professing Christians upon the teaching staff is striking; and in the Peeresses' School, which is as conservative and anti-foreign as any educational institution in Japan, there are five professing Christians among the thirty-five teachers. While, on the one hand, the Japanese Christians are not all models of all the virtues, while there is with many of them a tendency to modify their Christianity so as to accommodate a considerable amount of worldly wisdom, it is true, on the other hand, that the most active workers in the cause of philanthropy are men who have accepted the Christian faith, and who are striving in all earnestness to model their lives after the life of Jesus of Nazareth. The Christian Church in Japan to-day has its heroes and its back-sliders, and has between these two extremes a rank and file of every-day, commonplace men and women, who amidst frequent failures and in the midst of many temptations are making the name of Christian stand for a certain kind of life and a certain standard of virtue quite above and beyond the lives and standards of their countrymen. It is largely