“The persecution in this country, which before proceeded no further than banishment and loss of civil and religious liberties, has since (as this letter tells us) run up to all the severities of corporal punishment. The Christians suffered as many sorts of deaths and torments as those in the primitive persecutions; and such was their constancy that their adversaries were sooner weary of inflicting punishments than they of enduring the effects of their rage. Very few, if any at all, renounced their profession; the most hideous forms in which death appeared (by the contrivance of their adversaries) would not scare them, nor all the terrors of a solemn execution overpower that strength of mind with which they seemed to go through their sufferings. They made their very children martyrs with them, and carried them in their arms to the stake, choosing rather to resign them to the flames than leave them to the bonzes to be educated in the pagan religion. All the churches which the last storm left standing this had entirely blown down and demolished, and heathen pagodas were erected upon their ruins.” Edict after edict emanated, or at least were said to emanate, from the Shiogoon, ordering more and more severe action to be taken against the Christians. There remained no power of verifying these edicts, no one to speak a word at court for the unfortunate creatures; while they were surrounded by hungry wolves, who might invent edicts in order to profit by the confiscation of property, whose interest it was that the infant heir should be destroyed with his father, and who were further incited by the priests, or bozangs, who gnashed their teeth in the hour of victory over enemies who had lorded it so proudly over them in the short days of their prosperity. By such ferocity, combined with a strict watch kept up on foreign vessels, the Christian religion was nearly extirpated; but in the district of Arima, nearly the whole of the inhabitants, having all their lives professed Christianity, at last in desperation resolved rather to fight than submit to such a system of persecution. CHAPTER VII THE LAWS OF IYEYAS