With the acceptance of the doctrine of evolution, old forms of thought crumbled; new ideas everywhere arose to take the place of worn-out dogmas; and… - Lafcadio Hearn

the religion of the Jesuits could never have adapted itself to the social conditions of Japan; and by the fact of this incapacity the fate of the missions was really decided in advance. The intolerance, the intrigues, the savage persecutions carried on,~-all the treacheries and cruelties of the Jesuits may simply be considered as the manifestations of such incapacity; while the repressive measures taken by Iyéyasu and his successors signify sociologically no more than the national perception of supreme danger. It was recognized that the triumph of the foreign religion would involve the total disintegration of society, and the subjection of the empire to foreign domination.
Neither the artist nor the sociologist, at least, can regret the failure of the missions. Their extirpation, which enabled Japanese society to evolve to its type-limit, preserved for modem eyes the marvellous world of Japanese art, and the yet more marvellous world of its traditions, beliefs, and customs. Roman Catholicism, triumphant, would have swept all this out of existence. The natural antagonism of the artist to the missionary may be found in the fact that the latter is always, and must be, an unsparing destroyer. Everywhere the developments of art are associated in some sort with religion; and by so much as the art of a people reflects their beliefs, that art will be hateful to the enemies of those beliefs. Japanese art, of Buddhist origin, is especially an art of religious suggestion,—not merely as regards painting and sculpture, but likewise as regards decoration, and almost every product of aesthetic taste. There is something of religious feeling associated even with the Japanese delight in trees and flowers, the charm of gardens, the love of nature and of nature's voices,—-with all the poetry of existence, in short. Most)assuredly the Jesuits and their allies would have ended all this, every detail of it, without the slightest qualm. Even could they have understood and felt the meaning of that world of strange beauty.—result of a race-experience never to be repeated or replaced,—-they would not have hesitated a moment in the work of obliteration and effacement. To-day, indeed, that wonderful art-world is being surely and irretrievably destroyed by Western industrialism. But industrial influence, though pitiless, is not fanatic; and the destruction is not being carried on with such ferocious rapidity but that the fading story of beauty can be recorded for the future benefit of human civilization.

After the first recognition even by theology of physical evolution, it was easy to predict that the recognition of psychical evolution could not be indefinitely delayed; for the barrier erected by old dogma to keep men from looking backward had been broken down. And today for the student of scientific psychology the idea of pre-existence passes out of the realm of theory into the realm of fact, proving the Buddhist explanation of the universal mystery quite as plausible as any other. "None but very hasty thinkers," wrote the late Professor Huxley, "will reject it on the ground of inherent absurdity. Like the doctrine of evolution itself, that of transmigration has its roots in the world of reality; and it may claim such support as the great argument from analogy is capable of supplying.”

Any idealism is a proper subject for art.