Where can you find stronger warrior spirit than has always existed in
Japan? Yet Buddhism is the prevailing religion there. It is evident, I
think, that this explanation will not suffice. It may in addition be
asserted that the men of Latin nations are usually frankly atheistic,
and the Teutonic nations, though theoretically Christian, yet
practically when they want to fight they forget Christ and fall back to
the Jehovah of the Jews. The Puritans and the Boers are cases in point.
They get their fighting faith out of the Old Testament, not the New. But
still they accept Christ, and though they may find it impossible, like
all nations, to follow His teaching, they do not reject it, or deny it.
With Buddhism in the further East the parallel does not last, because
Buddhism in ethical teaching stands alone. The Buddhist who wants to
fight cannot fall back on the original faith. He has simply to go
without a faith at all. He has not the advantage of a double set of
conduct, one of which can always be trusted to fit anything he wants to
do He has to go without a faith when he fights. Still he does so.
I confess that for a long time I seemed to find no answer, and at length
it came not through studying out this question, but in observing other
phenomena of religion altogether.
To one coming to Europe after years in the East and visiting the
churches nothing is more striking than the enormous preponderance of
women there. It is immaterial whether the church be in England or in
France, whether it be Anglican or Roman Catholic or Dissenter. The
result is always the same. Women outnumber the men as two to one, as
three to one, sometimes as ten to one. Even of the men that are there,
how many go there from other motives than personal desire to hear the
service? Men go because their wives take them, boys go with their
mothers or sisters, old men with their daughters. Professional men are
there because it would injure them among their women clients to be
absent. Women go because they desire to do so; nine out of ten even of
these few men who do go are taken by their women folk. They admit it
readily. And more, when they are away from these women they do not enter
the churches. It is borne in upon an observer, especially an observer
who has been long enough away from Europe to become depolarised, to what
an enormous extent the observance of religious duty in Europe among
Christian nations is due to women. It is they only who care for, who are
in full sympathy with the teaching of Christ; for men when they are
religious, and in certain cases they are so, take their religion of
conduct much more from the Old Testament than the New.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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