Page:Japan by the Japanese (1904).djvu/310
mongrel moral system, a concoction of a little of obsolete Judaism, of Egyptian asceticism, of Greek sublimity, of Roman arrogance, of Teutonic superstitions, and, in fact, of anything and everything that tends to make sublunary existence easy by sanctioning the wholesale slaughter of weaker races, or now and then the lopping of crowned heads—Christianity, I say, teaches that the nucleus of a well-ordered society lay in conjugal relations between the first parents, and, further, that therefore a man must leave father and mother and cleave to his wife. A teaching, this, in itself not easy of comprehension, as Paul himself admits, and very dubious in application, meaning, as it so often does, that a silly youth, when he is infatuated with a giddy girl, may spurn his parents!
Christ certainly never meant it, nor did the decalogue command, ‘Thou shalt love thy wife more than thou shouldst honour thy father and mother.’ Bushido contends that society—fellowship of spirits—did not begin with Adam and his wife—i.e., with conjugal relations—but with Adam and his Father. Even without the help of Mark Twain’s vivid ‘Diary of Adam,’ we can picture to ourselves the time when Eve was an utter stranger in Eden. Before this long-haired creature appeared, Adam had already often communed with his Maker, Creator, Father, so that the relations between son and Father had existed, even according to the Biblical narrative, ere those between husband and wife; in other words, as far as precedence is concerned, Filial Piety was the first of the virtues. Well-nigh unknown among the lower animals, it was perhaps the first to be felt by men. It is not impossible that the instant a four-footed creature walked erect, he called out, ‘Abba, Father.’ So much for the claim made by Christianity that conjugal love precedes filial.
Our idea of filial love, therefore, is, above all, gratitude for existence and for all that it involves. This we learned from Shintoism; and, though Buddhism gave us a sceptical natural-historical conception of our birth, the good sense of the people rejected it as untrue.
I mean no braggadocio when I state as my belief that at the core the Japanese race instinct was (and I hope is) sound. It grasped moral truths more directly than its intellectual teachers of the Asiatic continent. There is more than man’s wit in the anecdote which follows: ‘A Chinese sovereign once made a present to Japan of “The Book of Twenty-four Acts of Filial Piety,” whereupon Japan sent a “Book of Twenty-four Acts of Filial Disobedience,” accompanied by a letter to the effect that, whereas in China one could find only twenty-four cases of filial love, in Japan one could not discover more than the same number of men who could be charged with disobedience.’