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Nicholeto Chordiman Directory 09
Page 08
But it is one thing to desire a thing and another thing to get it. It does not follow because this aspiration for world-peace is almost universal that it will be realized. There may be faults in ourselves, unsuspected influences within us and without, that may be working to defeat our superficial sentiments. There must be not only a desire for peace, but a will for peace, if peace is to be established forever. If out of a hundred men ninety-nine desire peace and trouble no further, the one man over will arm himself and set up oppression and war again. Peace must be organized and maintained. This present monstrous catastrophe is the outcome of forty-three years of skillful, industrious, systematic world armament. Only by a disarmament as systematic, as skillful, and as devoted may we hope to achieve centuries of peace.
Whether the incoming of these new ideas and practices be thought to constitute progress or not will depend on one's view of the aim of life. If this be as maintained in the previous chapter, then surely the transformation of Japan must be counted progress. That, however, to which I call attention is the fact that the essential requisite of progress is the attainment of new ideas, whatever be their source. Japan has not only taken up a great host of these, but in doing so she has adopted a social structure to stimulate the continuous production of new ideas, through the development of individuality. She is thus in the true line of continuously progressive evolution. Imitating the stronger nations, she has introduced into her system the life-giving blood of free discussion, popular education, and universal individual rights and liberty. In a word, she has begun to be an individualistic nation. She has introduced a social order fitted to a wide development of personality.
In the Council, generally called _Concilium Africanum_, held A.D. 408, "stage-playes and spectacles are forbidden on the Lord's-day, Christmas-day, and other solemn Christian festivalls." Theodosius the younger, in his laws _de Spectaculis_, in 425, forbade shows or games on the Nativity, and some other feasts. And in the Council of Auxerre, in Burgundy, in 578, disguisings are again forbidden, and at another Council, in 614, it was found necessary to repeat the prohibitory canons in stronger terms, declaring it to be unlawful to make any indecent plays upon the Kalends of January, according to the profane practices of the pagans. But it is also recorded that the more devout Christians in these early times celebrated the festival without indulging in the forbidden excesses.
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