e and a number of Jesuit priests as
missionaries.

The vessels in due course arrived at Bungo, and both priests and
traders were cordially, not to say enthusiastically, received.
Foreigners were evidently not then excluded from Japan, and no
objection whatever was made to the Christian propaganda in any part of
the country. The efforts of the Jesuit missionaries were crowned with
remarkable success. All ranks and classes, from priest to peasant,
embraced the Catholic faith. Churches, schools, convents, and
monasteries sprang up all over the country. The only opposition came
from the Bonzes, or native priests, who felt their influence and power
declining. They appealed to the Emperor to banish the Roman Catholic
priests, but the imperial edict simply was, "Leave the strangers in
peace." For forty years or thereabouts Catholicism not only flourished
but was triumphant. Indeed, a Japanese mission of three princes was
despatched to Pope Gregory XIII. laden with valuable presents. The
arrival of this mission was acclaimed as a veritable triumph
throughout Catholic Europe. By a stroke of irony its advent there was
almost contemporaneous with not only the overthrow but the almost
total extinction of Christianity in Japan. The edict for the
banishment of the missionaries was published in 1587. It was followed
by persecutions, martyrdoms, and the rasing of all the Christian
churches and buildings--the destruction, in a word, of Christianity in
Japan. This was in due course followed by not only the expulsion of
all foreigners from the country--with the exception of the Dutch, who
were allowed to have a factory at Nagasaki--but the enactment of a
law, rigidly observed for two and a half centuries, that no Japanese
should leave his country on any pretence whatever, and no foreigner be
permitted to land therein. Prior to this edict the Japanese had been
enterprising sailors and had extended their voyages to many distant
lands. What, it might be asked, was the reason of or occasion for this
violent change in the attitude of the Japanese to Christianity and the
presence of Europeans in their midst? It is impossible, at this length
of time, to arrive at a correct answer to this question, largely mixed
up as it has been with the _odium theologicum_. We have been told that
the result was greatly or altogether due to the pride, arrogance, and
avarice of the Roman Catholic priests; to the pretensions of the Pope,
which came to be regarded