A memory of the past bitter persecutions and of the hated rebellion still lingers. The old people talk of them around the hibachi, as they sip their tea and smoke their pipes; the young read of them in the histories, and thus their memory is kept alive. Many are still living who saw and read the rigid prohibitions of Christianity on the sign-boards over all the country, and they cannot forget them. There are not a few people in the empire who to this day have hardly learned that the changed attitude of the government toward Christianity is more than outward; and these still regard the foreign faith as the chief of all evils. It is really pathetic sometimes to hear them talk of it. There was an old man living near a Christian chapel not far from here, who one day was {276} complaining of his woes and wishing to die. He said it had been a bad year, and none of his crops had done well, two of his children had died, his country had been insulted by a foreign power, and, to cap the climax, Christianity had come and taken up its abode next door to him. This last evil was too much, and he wanted to die. He still regarded our faith as the worst of evils. I once gave a few tracts to some old men in a mountain village near Saga, and they remarked that they remembered the time when it would have meant certain death to be seen with one of those little books. (3) The _character of the education_ prevalent in Japan to-day is also antagonistic to Christianity. The Japanese are a studious race and are capable of high mental development. The country is so well supplied with schools--nearly all of them government institutions--that no one is too poor to receive some education. There is, on the part of the school authorities, no open antagonism to Christianity as such. According to the regulations, no one religion is to be favored more than another in the schools, and complete religious liberty is to be allowed. But the general tenor of the education given is unchristian--an exaltation of reason above faith, of science above religion. Especially is the tendency of the higher education against any form of religion. The {277} educators of Japan are training a nation of atheists and agnostics. The scientific schools of the West that have no room for religion are studied earnestly and copied by educated Japan. In philosophy Herbert Spencer and his school have been acknowledged masters. Indeed, it never seems to have occurred to the minds of thinking Japanese that there are systems of philosophy other than the materialistic. All religious sentiment is crushed in the schools, other things being substituted. Science, learning, is thought to be all that is necessary, and religion is left for old women and children. Men who still believe in religion are thought superstitious and uneducated, and are regarded with a sort of lordly contempt. In a conversation some time ago with a graduate of the Imperial University I