[339] We may reasonably doubt whether there were a million Christians in Japan at the beginning of the seventeenth century: the more probable claim of six hundred thousand can be accepted. In this era of toleration the efforts of all the foreign missionary bodies combined, and the yearly expenditure of immense sums in support of their work, have enabled them to achieve barely one-fifth f the success attributed to their Portuguese predecessors, upon a not incredible estimate. The sixteenth-century Jesuits were indeed able to exercise, through various lords, the most forcible sort of coercion upon whole populations of provinces; but the modern missions certainly enjoy advantages educational, financial, and legislative, much outweighing the doubtful value of the power to coerce; and the smallness of the results which they have achieved seems to require explanation. The explanation is not difficult. Needless attacks upon the ancestor-cult are necessarily attacks upon the constitution of society; and Japanese society instinctively resists these assaults upon its ethical basis. For it is an error to suppose that this Japanese society has yet arrived even at such a condition as Roman society presented in the second or third century of our era. Rather it remains at a stage resembling that of a Greek or Latin society many centuries before Christ. The introduction of railroads, telegraphs, modern arms of precision, modern applied science of all kinds, has not yet [340] sufficed to change the fundamental order of things, Superficial disintegrations are rapidly proceeding; new structures are forming; but the social condition still remains much like that which, in southern Europe, long preceded the introduction of Christianity.