A RECENT book, entitled, “Diary by a Japanese Convert,” written by a Japanese observer of Western ways, Kanyo Uchimura by name, makes some observations which are worthy of note, which Americans who boast of our civilization, would do well to consider, and see that without the life and power of Christianity mere name and profession are nothing. Mr. Uchimura says of his travels in the United States:— “I was again robbed of my new silk umbrella on a Fall River steamer, whose superb ornamentation and exquisite music conveyed to me no idea whatever of the spirit of knavery that lurked underneath—and so did once more liberate my heathen innocence. I felt the misfortune so keenly that only once in my life I prayed for the damnation of that execrable devil who could steal a shelter from a harmless stranger at the time of his dire necessity.” “Even the Chinese civilization of forty centuries ago could boast of a state of society when nobody picked up things dropped on the street. But here upon Christian waters, in a floating palace, under the spell of the music of Handel and Mendelssohn, things were as unsafe as in a den of robbers. Indeed, insecurity of things in Christendom is something to which we were wholly unaccustomed. Never have I seen more extensive use of keys than among these Christian people. We in our heathen homes have but very little recourse to keys; . . . no apprehensions are felt of our servants or neighbors ever transgressing upon our possessions. But things are quite otherwise in Christendom. Not only are safes and trunks locked, but doors and windows of all descriptions, chests, drawers, ice-boxes, sugar-vases, all. The housewife goes about with a bundle of keys jingling at her side; and a bachelor coming home in the evening has first to thrust his hand into his pocket to draw out a cluster of some twenty or thirty keys to find out one which will open to him his lonely cell. The house is locked from the front door to the pin-box, as if the spirit of robbery pervaded every cubic inch of the air. . . . Whether a civilization which requires cemented cellars and stone-cut vaults, watched over by bull-dogs and battalions of policemen, could be called Christian, is seriously doubted by honest heathens.”