“Hitherto your Holiness has heard, and with great pleasure, of the abundant fruits borne by this vine newly planted, with so much labor, at the extremities of the earth. Now you may see, touch, taste them, in this august assembly, and impart of them to all the faithful. What joy ought not all Christians to feel, and especially the Roman people, at seeing the ambassadors of such great princes come from the ends of the earth to prostrate themselves at the feet of your Holiness, through a pure motive of religion,—a thing which has never happened in any age! What satisfaction for them to see the most generous and valiant kings of the East, conquered by the arms of the faith and by the preaching of the gospel, submitting themselves to the empire of Jesus Christ, and, as they cannot, from their avocations, come in person to take the oath of obedience and fidelity to the holy see, acquitting themselves of this duty by ambassadors so nearly related to them, and whom they so tenderly love!” In the following passage the orator alludes more at length to the revolt in Europe against the authority of the Pope, which Philip II, no less than the Pope, was at this moment vigorously laboring to put down, by the recent introduction of the Jesuits into the Netherlands, where the Protestant rebels had been suppressed, by war against Holland, by aiding the French leaguers, by countenancing the retrograde movement then in rapid progress in Germany, and by preparing to carry out against Elizabeth of England the sentence of deposition which the Pope had fulminated against her. “O immortal God! What a stroke of thine arm! What an effect of thy grace! In places so distant from the holy see, where the name of Jesus had never been heard, nor his gospel ever preached, as soon as the true faith shed there the first rays of the truth, men of temperaments quite different from ours, kings illustrious by their nobility, redoubtable for their power, happy in the abundance of their possessions, conquerors and warriors signalized by their victories, acknowledge the greatness and dignity of the Roman church, and hold it a great honor to kiss the feet of the church’s head by the lips of persons infinitely dear to them; all this happens while we see men at our very gate blind and impious enough to wish to cut off with a parricidal hand the head of the mystic body of Jesus Christ, and to call in doubt, to their own ruin, the authority of the holy see, established by Jesus Christ himself, confirmed by the course of so many ages, defended by the writings of so many holy doctors, recognized and approved by so many councils! “But it is not proper that I should give way to grief, or trouble the joys of this day by the recollection of our miseries!” To this address, on behalf of the Japanese princes and their ambassadors, Monseigneur Antony Bocapaduli replied in Latin, in the Pope’s name, as follows: