Mr. Lafcadio Hearn, in his "attempt at an interpretation" of Japan, has, more clearly than any other writer I have consulted, described the Shinto ancestor-worship under its three forms of _Domestic_, _Communal_, and _State_ cults. In every case it is a worship of the dead, but the individual, whether he be the most obscure servant, the influential citizen, the commanding chieftain, or even the Mikado, is but a part and parcel of the body politic. There is a most remarkable unity of popular and national life. Government and religion are virtually identical, and there is no distinction between religion and morality. Obedience and conformity to the rules of family life, and to the customs of society and the requirements of the State--these are the simple sum-total of Shinto law and gospel. The individual must always stand ready to be sacrificed for the good of the community or of the State. Everything is to be regarded as public, and must serve the public weal. There is no such thing as privacy, and oddities have no respectable standing. Tradition and custom seem to constitute the essence of religion as well as of family, communal, and more public life. There is no code of moral law; there is nothing in the worship that is fairly comparable to what we understand by dogma, creed, or Church. Strictly speaking, this system has no heaven or hell, no deep sense of sin, and no concept of mediatorial redemption from sin and evil. The dead--all the dead of all the ages--are conceived as somehow living in the unseen vacancy around, above, below; they are present at the worship; they haunt the tombs; they are interested in the life and works of their descendants; they visit their former homes and attend the family worship there; their happiness, in fact, depends upon the honor and worship which their living descendants pay them; and also the happiness and prosperity of the living is believed to depend upon their sense of filial duty and proper reverence toward the dead. Furthermore, all the dead are supposed to become gods and attain to supernatural power. But there is no one Supreme Deity; no central throne of God; no paradise of heavenly blessedness. So far as any ideas of this kind obtain among the people, they may be regarded as later conceptions introduced by missionaries or adherents of other religious systems. But the cult implies beyond question a belief in some kind of future life. The _Yomi_, or Hades, of Shinto mythology, into which Izanagi went to seek his lost sister, was conceived as "a hideous and polluted land," and even the realm of the unseen heavenly deities was never longed for by the devotees of Shinto. Dooman observes that "to the Japanese mind and imagination Japan, as a place of residence, was far superior to heaven, and its inhabitants a far more desirable society than those living in the transcendent regions. We see that every god who is sent from heaven to Japan on some important business by the