From these words you might perhaps conclude that Buddhism succeeded in supplanting the native cult, at least for more than a thousand years. But, strange to say, if we judge the case not by outward appearances, but by the religious conviction that lurks in the depth of the heart, we cannot but recognise the undeniable fact that no real conversion has ever been achieved during the past eleven centuries by the doctrine of Buddha. Our actual self, notwithstanding the different clothes we have put on has ever remained true in its spirit to our native cult. Speaking generally, we are still Shintoists to this day--Buddhists, Christians, and all--so long as we are born Japanese. This might sound to you somewhat paradoxical. Here is the explanation:-- For an average Japanese mind in present Japan, thanks to the ancestor-worship practised consciously or unconsciously from time immemorial, it is not altogether easy to imagine the spirit of the deceased, if it believes in one at all, to be something different and distant from our actual living self. The departed, although invisible, are thought to be leading their ethereal life in the same world in much the same state as that to which they had been accustomed while on earth. Like the little child so touchingly described by Wordsworth, we cannot see why we should not count the so-called dead still among the existing. The difference between the two is that of tangibility or visibility, but nothing more. The _raison d'être_ of this illusive notion is, of course, not far to seek. Any book on anthropology or ethnology would tell you how sleep, trance, dream, hallucination, reflection in still water, etc., help to build up the spirit-world in the untaught mind of primitive man. Yet it must be remembered that these origins have led to something far higher, to something of real value to our nation, and to something which is a moral force in our daily lives that may well be compared to what is efficacious in other creeds. Notice the fact that Buddhism from the moment of its introduction in the sixth century after Christ to this very day has on the whole remained the religion, so to say, of night and gloomy death, while Shintoism has always retained its firm hold on the popular mind as the cult, if I might so express it, of daylight and the living dead. From the very dawn of our history we read of patriarchs, chieftains, and national heroes deified and worshipped as so many guardian spirits of families, of clans, or of the country. Nor has this process of deification come to an end yet, even in this age of airship and submarine boat. We continue to erect shrines to men of merit. This may look very strange to you, but is not your poet Swinburne right when he sings-- 'Whoso takes the world's life on him and his own lays down, He, dying so, lives.'