Right conduct may usually be easily referred to an origin in one or other of these three classes of motives. The duty of refraining from excess in eating and drinking belongs primarily to the first, the care of children and the avoidance of theft, murder, or adultery to the second, acts of worship and abstinence from impiety and blasphemy to the third. There is, however, a tendency for these motives to encroach on each other's provinces without relinquishing their own. Acts which belong at first to one category end by receiving the sanction of the other motives. Drunkenness, at first thought harmless, is soon recognized as folly, though harming nobody but the drunkard himself. It is eventually seen to be also a crime against the community, and last of all a sin in the eyes of God. Criminal Law is a systematic enforcement of the rights of others by adding prudential motives for respecting them. It also punishes blasphemy and heresy, no doubt for the protection of the interests of the community against the curse which such offences bring down. With ourselves religion condemns not only direct offences against the Deity as in the first three commandments, but selfish folly, and throws its ægis over the rights of our neighbour, by prohibiting theft, murder, adultery, lying, disrespect to parents, &c. Can it be doubted that these were already offences before the ten commandments were delivered from Mount Sinai? There is no stronger proof of the rudimentary character of Shinto than the exceedingly casual and imperfect sanction which it extends to altruistic morality. It has scarcely anything in the nature of a code of ethics. Zeus had not yet wedded Themis. There is no direct moral teaching in its sacred books. A schedule of offences against the Gods, to absolve which the ceremony of Great Purification was performed twice a year,[193] contains no one of the sins of the Decalogue.[194] Incest, bestiality, wounding, witchcraft, and certain interferences with agricultural operations are the only offences against the moral law which it enumerates. The _Kojiki_ speaks of a case of homicide being followed by a purification of the actor in it. But the homicide is represented as justifiable, and the offence was therefore not so much moral as ritual.[195] Modern Japanese boldly claim this feature of their religion as a merit. Motoöri thought that moral codes were good for Chinese, whose inferior natures required such artificial means of restraint. His pupil Hirata denounced systems of morality as a disgrace to the country which produced them. In 'Japan,' a recent work published in English by Japanese authors, we are told that "Shinto provides no moral code, and relies solely on the promptings of conscience for ethical guidance. If man derives the first principles of his duties from intuition, a schedule of rules and regulations for the direction of everyday conduct becomes not only superfluous but illogical."