be made burning and bright, so that it may kindle. into zeal even the simplest and most ignorant soul."

Then she left him, and it was not for some years that he discovered that he had been conversing with the daughter of Fujiwara Kanezane, the lady who afterwards became his wife. [**]

I have told this story because it seems to it illustrate one or two of the questions brought before us in our consideration of the Shinshu Catechism.

For what period in the world's history, we are asked, and for what persons are the Shinshu doctrines of Salvation by Faith in Amida specially suitable? They are suited especially for the "last days," is the answer, for the matsudai, [*+] the sue no yo, in which we live. And they are suited for sinners, for weak, vacillating, helpless, persons like ourselves, who have not the moral and spiritual strength necessary for the working out of our own salvation. What does not St. Paul tell us of the last days, and of the mercy of God revealed to sinful man in them? And what sign of Christ's truth is there greater than this,--that the "poor have the Gospel preached unto them?"

St. Paul has focussed the whole of Christianity for us into a single point. "I determined to know

nothing among you save Christ Jesus and Him crucified," and the focussed rays of light, coming through that burning glass, have always been bright and powerful. "Christ and Him crucified" has always been a simple formula, well within the intellectual grasp of the most ignorant and the most unlearned. And Christians have at times been charged with almost wilful ignorance.

So has it been with Shinshuism. Tama Hi no Miya's gift to her future husband bore its fruit, when he became a disciple of Honen, and preached that simple faith which Honen first formulated into a system, but which a constant succession of pious monks had held and taught throughout all the years since the commencement of the Mahayana. Faith in Amida has always been in Japan a burning glass, quickening certain souls into spiritual life, and giving hope to the ignorant, the unhappy, the sinful. And, like Christians, the holders of this faith have at times been charged with ignorance. Monto mono wo shirazu,--the "Monto know nothing,"--has passed into a proverb.

But as there were occasions when St. Paul could "speak wisdom," so the Shinshu has its philosophies for the perfect, the spiritual, the wise man. It does not reject knowledge, it only assigns it to a secondary , instead of making it the end-all of religion. "Had Christ said, 'He that hath known me hath known the Father, he would have been but a man," said to me a disciple of Honen. "But he said 'He that hath seen me,' and that word SEEN showed Him to be God."

There is a simple summary of the Shinshu faith