They tried hard to persuade me to let them defer the publication of the edict until it could be incorporated in a new code of laws which, they said, was about to be drawn up. To this I had resolutely to refuse assent. At the same time I could not but see that they had to consider old prejudices, old jealousies, old hatreds; “rust cannot be cleared off an old blade with one rubbing;” they had to go forward warily. However, to cut short a long story and the record of many an hour of debate, every minute of which increased my respect for Prince Daté and Higashi Kuzé, I succeeded in getting the government to post the famous edict in every town, village and hamlet throughout the land. My chief was greatly pleased. It was a triumph for which he received great kudos. The case of the Urakami Christians furnished me with a still more difficult task. “Think not that I am come to send peace on earth; I came not to send peace, but a sword.” In no country did these words, with the terrible forecasts that follow them, prove more true than in Japan. When St. Francis Xavier, under the guidance of a gentleman of the Satsuma clan, reached the land of Sunrise, the great missionary met with many troubles, but was rewarded by great successes. I do not propose to tell the story of the first efforts to Christianize Japan—suffice it to say here, that all went well until the heavy-footed, clumsy Franciscans in Japan, as in China, trampled to death the seed of religion which had been sown and diligently watered by the more delicate Jesuits. Interference with the laws and internal affairs of the country were meat and drink to the Franciscans, so that the great Kido was historically justified when, on one occasion, he said: “It seems to me that missionaries are men who are sent here to teach the people to disobey the laws of their country.” Those who are curious in such matters will find the history of the persecutions—sometimes, it must be admitted, retaliations—admirably told in Mr. Longford’s “Story of Old Japan.”[11] The persecutions of Hidéyoshi and Iyéyasu failed entirely to outroot Christianity; it simply disappeared out of sight. There were in many parts of the country small scattered colonies of Christians, faithful men who, without the teaching of a priest or the ministrations of a pastor, clung to the creed for which more than two centuries before their forefathers had been tortured and perished. It must have been a very simple form of faith without much dogma about it, but they believed in God and worshipped the Saviour who had died for their sins, and that was enough. One such colony existed at Urakami, a village not far from Nagasaki, the chief scene of the old persecutions, a community entirely composed of Christians, numbering some four thousand souls. The reactionaries at the Court of Kiōto had determined that these people must be put to the sword and extirpated.