Japan and the Japanese

RELIGIOUS SYSTEM OF SINTO.
geding, to a great extent, the old system, of which the Dairi was
the. head.
One might kave expected from the Portuguese missionaries a
pretty exact account of the various creeds and sects of Japan,
or, at least, of the two leading religions, between which the great
bulk of the people were divided; instead of which they confound
perpetually the ministers of the two religions under the common
name of bonzes, taking very little pains to distinguish between two
systems both of- which they regarded as equally false and pernicious.
Their attention, indeed, seems to have been principally fixed on the
new religion, that of Buddha, or Fo, of which the adherents were by far
the most numerous, and the hierarchy the most compact and for
midable, presenting, in its organization and practices (with, however,
on some points a very different set of doctrines), a most singular
counterpart to the Catholic church, a similarity which the mis-
sionaries could only explain by the theory of a diabolical imitation ;
and which some subsequent Catholic writers have been inclined to
ascribe, upon very unsatisfactory grounds, to the ancient labors of
Armenian and Nestorian missionaries, being extremely unwilling to
admit what seems, however, very probable, if not, indeed, certain,
little attention has as yet been given to this interesting inquiry,
that some leading ideas of the Catholic church have been derived from
Buddhist sources, whose missionaries, while penetrating, as we know
they did, to the East, and converting entire nations, may well be
supposed not to have been without their influence aigo on the West.
Notwithstanding, however, the general prftvaleaee, at the time
when first Japan became known to Europeans, oft the doctrine of
Buddha,
of which there would seem to have been quite a number
of distinct observances, not unlike the different orders of monks and
friars in the Catholic church, it appears, as well from the memoirs
of the Jesuit missionaries, as from more exact and subsequent ob-
servations made by residents in the Dutch service, that there also
existed another and more ancient religious system, with which the
person and authority of the Dairi had been and still were closely
identified. This system was known as the religion of Sinto, or of
the Kami a name given not only to the seven mythological per-
sonages, or celestial gods, who compose the first Japanese dynasty,
and to the five demigods, or terrestrial gods, who compose the second