A LIVING GOD

latable; — I mean that the Japanese ideas attached to them cannot be conveyed by translation. The so-called “august house” of the Kami is not so much a temple, in the classic meaning of the term, as it is a haunted room, a spirit-chamber, a ghost-house; many of the lesser divinities are truly ghosts—ghosts of great warriors and heroes and rulers and teachers, who lived and loved and died hundreds or thousands of years ago. I imagine that to the Western mind the word “ghost-house” will convey, better than such terms as “shrine” and “temple,” some vague notion of the strange character of the Shintō miya or yashiro—containing in its perpetual dusk nothing more substantial than symbols or tokens, the latter probably of paper. Now the emptiness behind the screened front is more suggestive than anything material could possibly be; and when you remember that millions of people during thousands of years have worshiped their great dead before such yashiro—that a whole race still believes those buildings are occupied by invisible, conscious personalities—you are also likely to reflect how difficult it would be to prove the