The Invention of a New Religion

Voltaire and the other eighteenth-century philosophers, who heldreligions to be the invention of priests, have been scorned assuperficial by later investigators. But was there not something intheir view, after all? Have not we, of a later and more critical day,got into so inveterate a habit of digging deep that we sometimesfail to see what lies before our very noses? Modern Japan is thereto furnish an example. The Japanese are, it is true, commonly saidto be an irreligious people. They say so themselves. Writes one ofthem, the celebrated Fukuzawa, teacher and type of the moderneducated Japanese man: "I lack a religious nature, and have neverbelieved in any religion." A score of like pronouncements mightbe quoted from other leading men. The average, even educated,European strikes the average educated Japanese as strangelysuperstitious, unaccountably occupied with supra-mundanematters.