The beneficent influence of the summer sun on the ripening corn led those who lived by agriculture to value the blessing as the gift of a goddess, and they revered her as “Ama-no-terasu,” the splendour of the skies, and regarded her as the special ancestress of their adored ruler. Thus, as one authority has remarked, to those Japanese whose first idea of duty is loyalty to the Emperor,—and this means the nation at large,—Shinto becomes a system of patriotism exalted to the rank of a religion. The common people still regard it in that light, and continue to worship and pray at its temples, though officially it was secularised six years ago and placed under the control of a Bureau of Shrines, as distinct from the Bureau of Religions, which takes cognisance of matters affecting the Buddhist and Christian faiths. In 1899 the officials of the Isé shrines, which are the oldest in the Empire, and in which are preserved the three sacred emblems of the monarchy,—the mirror, sword, and jewel of antiquity,—symbolical of regal power, and looked upon as coeval with the dynasty itself,—took measures to define their position as heads of a secular organisation. They then described Shintoism as “a mechanism for keeping generations in touch with generations, and preserving the continuity of the nation’s veneration for its ancestors.” But throughout the length and breadth of the land the sight of a Shinto shrine will continue to prompt the passer-by to pause for a moment in his journey, to fold his hands in silent prayer, to cast a coin into the capacious moneybox, and to bow the head in submission to a higher will, no matter whether the rites of Shinto worship be for the future viewed in the light of a religion or only as a cult. [Illustration: THE GEKU SHRINE AT ISÉ]