morals. They were therefore driven either to deny the necessity of anything of the kind, or to put forward as derived from Shinto a system of ethical teaching which was really borrowed from China.
It may not be out of place here to describe in as few words as possible the old Shinto of the seventh and eighth centuries, which Motoöri aimed at restoring. It was essentially a nature-worship, upon which was grafted a cult of ancestors. It tells us nothing of a future state of rewards and punishments, and contains the merest traces of moral teaching. The Norito, quoted in an earlier chapter, in enumerating the offences from which the nation was purged twice a year by the Mikado or his representatives, makes no mention of any one of the sins of the decalogue. What then remains? A mythical history of the creation of the world, and of the doings of a number of gods and goddesses, the chief of whom, namely, the Sun Goddess, was the ancestress of the human rulers of Japan, while from the subordinate deities were sprung the principal noble families who formed their court. Add to this a ceremonial comprising liturgies in honour of these deities and we have the Shinto religion.
The mythological record begins with the bare names of a number of gods who seem to have been provided merely in order to form a genealogy for Izanagi and Izanami, the male and female creator deities of Japan. The creation is thus described:—
Izanagi and Izanami, at the bidding of the other deities, took into their hands the "Jewel-spear of Heaven," and standing on the "Floating-bridge of Heaven," stirred with it the chaotic mass below. The brine which dripped from its point curdled and became an island. The divine pair descended thither and proceeded to procreate the
