His pupil Hirata (1776-1843) was less of a literary man and more of a theologian than his master. In a long life he wrote numbers of books, amounting to hundreds of volumes, and delivered innumerable lectures urging the claims of the old Shinto. His teaching was so successful that it at last drew upon him the attention of the Shōgun's Government, who, finding that their own authority was being undermined by the prominence given to the _de jure_ sovereign rights of the Sun-Goddess's descendants, forbade his lectures and banished him to his native province of Dewa. Hirata's anti-foreign prejudices did not prevent him from believing in the immortality of the soul--a doctrine of Buddhist origin--or from borrowing from China a worship of ancestors quite different from anything in the old Shinto. He adopts the Chinese duty of "filial piety," and makes strenuous but unavailing efforts to find countenance for it in the _Kojiki_ and _Nihongi_. Though he says that the Kami detest Buddhism because it teaches us to abandon lord and parent, wife and child, and is therefore destructive of morality, and because its adherents are filthy beggars, who boast of wearing cast-off rags and eating food given in charity, in another place he goes so far as to admit Buddha to his Shinto Pantheon, on condition that he shall be content with an inferior position. He tacitly accepts the moral code of China, while protesting that such things are unnecessary, as we are endowed by nature with an intuitive knowledge of right and wrong. The agitation for the revival of Pure Shinto was a retrograde movement, which could only end in failure. It contributed substantially, however, to the success of the political revolution which in 1868 brought about the restoration of the Mikado to the sovereign position which was the logical outcome of Motoöri's and Hirata's teachings. The Shinto reformation of the same date, when the Buddhist priests were removed from the Ryōbu shrines, and a certain purification of ritual and ornaments was effected, was also due to their influence.[344] =Shingaku=.--A school of preachers who called their doctrine _shingaku_ or "heart-learning," and professed to combine Shinto with Buddhism and Confucianism, had some vogue in the first half of the nineteenth century. These men were in reality rationalists, who took the maxims of Confucius and Mencius as the basis of their doctrines. Any Shinto element which they may contain is quite inappreciable. Their sermons, of which a good number have been printed, are in the colloquial dialect. They are very entertaining and, despite an occasional bit of indecency, not unedifying.