It is surely not unnatural that human nature should succumb to such torments. Even the well seasoned nerves of the Jesuit fathers were not always able to endure to the end. The enemies of the Jesuits delight in narrating the apostasy of Father Christopher Ferreyra, seventy years old, a Portuguese missionary and the provincial of the order. He was captured in Nagasaki, 1633, and was tortured by suspension in the _Fosse_. After five hours he gave the signal of recantation and was released. He was kept for some time in prison and compelled to give information concerning the members of his order in Japan. He was set at liberty and forced to marry, assuming the Japanese dress and a Japanese name. There was a report set on foot by the Jesuits that in his old age when on his death-bed he recovered his courage and declared himself a Christian, whereupon he was immediately carried off by the Japanese officers to the torture of the _Fosse_, where he perished a penitent martyr. It was at this time that the method of trial called _E-fumi_,(214) or trampling on the cross, was instituted. At first pictures on paper were used, then slabs of wood were substituted as more durable, and finally in the year 1660 an engraver of Nagasaki, named Yusa, cast bronze plates from the metal obtained by despoiling the altars of the churches. These plates were about five inches long and four inches wide and one inch thick, and had on them a figure of Christ on the cross. We take from the French edition of Kæmpfer’s _History of Japan_(215) an account of what he calls “this detestable solemnity.” It was conducted by an officer called the _kirishitan bugyō_, or Christian inquisitor, and began on the second day of the first month. In Nagasaki it was commenced at two different places at once, and was carried on from house to house until the whole city was finished. The officers of each street were required to be present. The metal plate on which was a figure of the Saviour upon the cross was laid upon the floor. Then the head of the house, his family, and servants of both sexes, old and young, and any lodgers that might be in the house, were called into the room. The secretary of the inquisitor thereupon made a list of the household and called upon them one by one to set their feet on the plate. Even young children not able to walk were carried by their mothers and made to step on the images with their feet. Then the head of the family put his seal to the list as a certificate to be laid before the governor that the inquisition had been performed in his house. If any refused thus to trample on the cross they were at once turned over to the proper officers to be tortured as the cases required. This same method of trial was used in the provinces about Nagasaki, the governor lending to the officers the plate which they might use.