ABSTRACT
The epilogue synthetizes the nature of the Meiji and Taishō Christian experience: a shared romantic desire to transcend one’s historicity that found inspiration in Protestantism’s heightened sense of self and ethical responsibility. Such a romantic dream of self-transcendence, however, found an ironic foe, not in the dichotomies that seemed to frustrate its aspirations on the surface – the conflicts between spirit and soul, art and faith, nature and society, public and private – but rather in the deterministic view of fate, and by extension salvation, that Meiji Protestantism seemed to postulate.
