The Jesuit seminaries in Japan being broken up, they had organized one at Macao for the education of Japanese ecclesiastics; but the severe penalties denounced against all priests coming into Japan, and against all, whether natives or foreigners, who should shelter them after their arrival, made the existence of the church and the celebration of divine service every day more precarious. From year to year it grew more and more difficult for new missionaries to get landed, great as was the zeal for that service. Of those who did land, the greater part were immediately seized and put to death. Large rewards were offered to any person who would betray or take a missionary. Those already in the country lived in hourly danger of arrest, forced to conceal themselves in cellars, holes and caverns and the huts of lepers, exposing to tortures and death all who might bring them food, or in any way assist in concealing them. The greatness of their sufferings does not depend merely upon the testimony of their own letters. Roger Gysbert, a Dutch Protestant and a resident in Japan, between the years 1622 and 1629, wrote an affecting narrative of it, and the general fact is strongly stated in Caron’s account of Japan, written a few years later. Gysbert, in his narrative[111], relates the martyrdom of more than five hundred persons; but there was a still larger amount of suffering which terminated not in martyrdom, but in recantation. The Japanese officers seldom exhibited any personal malice against the Catholics. Their sole object was the extinction of that faith. They made it a study to deny the crown of martyrdom so enthusiastically sought, and by a series of protracted and ingenious tortures to force a renunciation. For this purpose the prisoners were sprinkled with water from the boiling sulphur springs, not far from Nagasaki, and exposed to breathe their stifling odor. The modesty of the women was barbarously assailed, and numerous means of protracted torture were resorted to, such as in general proved sooner or later successful. Other means were employed still more efficacious. All natives engaged in foreign trade were required to give in an exact statement of their property, which, unless the proprietors would conform to the national faith, was declared forfeited. It was even forbidden that European merchants should lodge in the houses of any who were or had been Catholics. At Hirado and Nagasaki all heads of families were obliged to swear, in the presence of an idol, that there were no Catholics in their houses, and, according to the Japanese usage, to sign this declaration with their blood. From Melchior Santvoort, an old Dutchman, one of the companions of Adams in the first Dutch voyage to Japan, and a resident at Nagasaki, the authorities were indeed satisfied to take instead a declaration that he was a Hollander,—a circumstance which gave occasion to the scandal at which Kämpfer is so indignant, that the Hollanders