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Lafcadio Hearn - Kokoro
imaginings about the civilization of the races professing Christianity. It then seemed to many reflective
Japanese, possibly even to the keen minds directing the national policy, that Japan was doomed to pass
altogether under alien rule. There was hope, indeed; and while even the ghost of hope remained, the duty
for all was plain. But the power that could be used against the Empire was irresistible. And studying the
enormity of that power, the young. Oriental could not but ask himself, with a wonder approaching awe,
whence and how it had been gained. Could it, as his aged teacher averred, have some occult relation to a
higher religion? Certainly the ancient Chinese philosophy, which declared the prosperity of peoples
proportionate to their observance of celestial law and their obedience to the teaching of sages,
countenanced such a theory. And if the superior force of Western civilization really indicated the
superior character of Western ethics, was it not the plain duty of every patriot to follow that higher faith,
and to strive for the conversion of the whole nation? A youth of that era, educated in Chinese wisdom,
and necessarily ignorant of the history of social evolution in the West, could never have imagined that
the very highest forms of material progress were developed chiefly through a merciless competition out
of all harmony with Christian idealism, and at variance with every great system of ethics. Even to-day in
the West unthinking millions imagine some divine connection between military power and Christian
belief, and utterances are made in our pulpits implying divine justification for political robberies, and
heavenly inspiration for the invention of high explosives. There still survives among us the superstition
that races professing Christianity are divinely destined to rob or exterminate races holding other beliefs.
Some men occasionally express their conviction that we still worship Thor and Odin, - the only
difference being that Odin has become a mathematician, and that the Hammer Mjolnir is now worked by
steam. But such persons are declared by the missionaries to be atheists and men of shameless lives.
Be this as it may, a time came when the young samurai resolved to proclaim himself a Christian, despite
the opposition of his kindred. It was a bold step; but his early training had given him firmness; and he
was not to be moved from his decision even by the sorrow of his parents. His rejection of the ancestral
faith would signify more than temporary pain for him: it would mean disinheritance, the contempt of old
comrades, loss of rank, and all the consequences of bitter poverty. But his samurai training had taught
him to despise self. He saw what he believed to be his duty as a patriot and as a truthseeker, and he
followed it without fear or regret.
VI
Those who hope to substitute their own Western creed in the room of one which they wreck by the aid of
knowledge borrowed from modern science, do not imagine that the arguments used against the ancient
faith can be used with equal force against the new. Unable himself to reach the higher levels of modern
thought, the average missionary cannot foresee the result of his small teaching of science upon an
Oriental mind naturally more powerful than his own. He is therefore astonished and shocked to discover
that the more intelligent his pupil, the briefer the term of that pupil's Christianity. To destroy personal
faith in a fine mind previously satisfied with Buddhist cosmogony, because innocent of science, is not
extremely difficult. But to substitute, in the same mind, Western religious emotions for Oriental,
Presbyterian or Baptist dogmatisms for Chinese and Buddhist ethics, is not possible. The psychological
difficulties in the way are never recognized by our modern evangelists. In former ages, when the faith of
the Jesuits and the friars was not less superstitious than the faith they strove to supplant, the same
deep-lying obstacles existed; and the Spanish priest, even while accomplishing marvels by his immense
sincerity and fiery zeal, must have felt that to fully realize his dream he would need the sword of the
Spanish soldier. To-day the conditions are far less favorable for any work of conversion than they ever
were in the sixteenth century. Education has been secularized and remodeled upon a scientific basis; our
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