The neglect of indications of number in the Japanese language often renders it impossible to say whether a God belongs to an individual natural object or phenomenon or to a class. I therefore take these two classes of deities together, noting the distinction wherever it is possible or desirable. =The Sun-Goddess=.--The most eminent of the Shinto deities is the Sun-Goddess. Nor is this surprising. If, as Scotus Erigena has well said, "every visible and invisible creature is a theophany or appearance of God," what more striking aspect of Him can there be to the uncultured mind than the Sun? In a later stage of intellectual development men find a fuller revelation of Him in the moral order of the world, in the laws of human progress, and in the spiritual experiences of saints and sages, culminating in a synthesis of all the divine aspects of the universe in one harmonious whole. But, naturally enough, there is little of this in Shinto. The ancient Japanese recognized the divinity of the universe in a very imperfect, piecemeal fashion, and almost exclusively in those physical aspects by which they were more directly affected. Among these the light and warmth of the Sun and the sources of their daily food held the chief place. Sun-worship is specially natural to the Japanese as an agricultural people. Almost all the peasant's doings are in some way dependent on, or regulated by, the Sun. The application of the term "fetish" to the Sun considered as an object of adoration is to be deprecated. It implies a stigma which is altogether out of place. Socrates prayed to the Sun; Æschylus's Prometheus appeals to him against the tyranny of Zeus; in Sophocles's' Œdipus Tyrannus' the Chorus swears by "the Sun, chief of all the Gods"; Plato says that "the soul of the Sun should be deemed a God by every one who has the least particle of sense"; Goethe admitted his claims to worship; Don Quixote swears by God and by the Sun in the same breath, and Tristram Shandy "by the great God of Day." Milton, in the character of Satan, it is true, addresses the Sun in terms of awe and wonder, and Swinburne calls him "the living and visible God." The name of the first day of the week still remains to show what an important place he held in the religion of our forefathers. The association of the ideas of light, splendour, and brightness with divinity has its origin in a primæval sun-worship. William the Conqueror swore "by the splendour of God." _Divine_ contains the root _div_, brightness. Milton calls light "of the eternal co-eternal beam." No doubt so long as a nation is hesitating between sun-worship and a higher form of religion there is a reason for treating the former with contempt and aversion. No form of faith is so odious--because of the danger of relapse--as that from which we have emerged with painful effort to something higher. But such intolerance is no longer needed. It is now unnecessary to punish