The Japanese annals, which are scarcely more than a chronological table of successions, cast little light upon the causes and progress of this revolution;[29] but, from the analogy of similar cases, we may conjecture that it was occasioned, at least in part, by the introduction into Japan, and the spread there, of a new religion, gradually superseding, to a great extent, the old system, of which the Dairi was the head. [Illustration: IMAGE OF YORITOMO From _Official History of Japan_] One might have expected from the Portuguese missionaries a pretty exact account of the various creeds and sects of Japan, or, at least, of the two leading religions, between which the great bulk of the people were divided; instead of which they confound perpetually the ministers of the two religions under the common name of bonzes, taking very little pains to distinguish between the two systems, both of which they regarded as equally false and pernicious. Their attention, indeed, seems to have been principally fixed on the new religion, that of Buddha, or Ho, of which the adherents were by far the most numerous, and the hierarchy the most compact and formidable, presenting, in its organization and practices (with, however, on some points a very different set of doctrines), a most singular counterpart to the Catholic Church,—a similarity which the missionaries could only explain by the theory of a diabolical imitation; and which some subsequent Catholic writers have been inclined to ascribe, upon very unsatisfactory grounds, to the ancient labors of Armenian and Nestorian missionaries, being extremely unwilling to admit what seems, however, very probable, if not, indeed, certain,—little attention has as yet been given to this interesting inquiry,—that some leading ideas of the Catholic Church have been derived from Buddhist sources, whose missionaries, while penetrating, as we know they did, to the East, and converting entire nations, may well be supposed not to have been without their influence also on the West.