Might not these lines explain, when duly extended, the subtle feeling that lurks behind our apparently incomprehensible custom of speaking with the departed over the altar? The present deification, is, like your custom of erecting monuments to men of merit, a way of making the best part of a man's career legible to the coming generations. The numberless shrines you now find scattered all over Japan are only so many chapters written in unmistakable characters of the lessons our beloved and revered heroes and good men have left us for our edification and amelioration. It is in the sunny space within the simple railing of these Shinto shrines, where the smiling presence of the patron spirit of a deified forefather or a great man is so clearly felt, that our childhood has played for tens of centuries its games of innocent joy. Monthly and yearly festivals are observed within the divine enclosure of a guardian god, when a whole community under his protection let themselves go in good-natured laughter and gleeful mirth before the favouring eyes of their divine patron. How different is this jovial feeling from that gloomy sensation with which we approach a Buddhist temple, recalling death and the misery of life from every corner of its mysterious interior. Such seriousness has never been congenial to the gay Japanese mind with its strong love of openness and light. Until death stares us right in the face, we do not care to be religious in the ordinary sense of the term. True, we say and think that we believe in death, but all the while this so-called death is nothing else than a new life in this present world of ours led in a supernatural way. For instance, when the father of a Japanese family begins a journey of any length, the raised part of his room will be made sacred to his memory during his temporary absence; his family will gather in front of it and think of him, expressing their devotion and love in words and gifts in kind. In the hundreds of thousands of families that have some one or other of their members fighting for the nation in this dreadful war with Russia, there will not be even one solitary house where the mother, wife, or sister is not practising this simple rite of endearment for the beloved and absent member of the family. And if he die on the field, the mental attitude of the poor bereaved towards the never-returning does not show any substantial difference. The temporarily departed will now be regarded as the forever departed, but not as lost or passed away. His essential self is ever present, only not visible. Daily offerings and salutations continue in exactly the same way as when he was absent for a time. Even in the mind of the modern Japanese with its extremely agnostic tendencies, there is still one corner sacred to this inherited feeling. You could sooner convince an ordinary European of the non-existence of a personal God. When it gets dusk every bird knows whither to wing its way home.