Nor can the Japanese in a day, or a generation, rethumb
himself in our image.
Back of our own great race adventure, back of our robberies by sea
and land, our lusts and violences and all the evil things we have
done, there is a certain integrity, a sternness of conscience, a
melancholy responsibility of life, a sympathy and comradeship and
warm human feel, which is ours, indubitably ours, and which we cannot
teach to the Oriental as we would teach logarithms or the trajectory
of projectiles. That we have groped for the way of right conduct and
agonized over the soul betokens our spiritual endowment. Though we
have strayed often and far from righteousness, the voices of the
seers have always been raised, and we have harked back to the bidding
of conscience. The colossal fact of our history is that we have made
the religion of Jesus Christ our religion. No matter how dark in
error and deed, ours has been a history of spiritual struggle and
endeavour. We are pre-eminently a religious race, which is another
way of saying that we are a right-seeking race.
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