It is perhaps not surprising that the resumption of power by the Mikado should have led to a revival of Shintō, the religion of the Gods, from whom he claimed descent. The more bigoted of the men by whom the Emperor was surrounded, new to government and little suspecting the troubles which, in the altered condition of things, religious intolerance could not fail to bring upon their country, were fired by zeal for the old worship, and they demanded the extirpation of the religion in which they saw its chief enemies. Urakami was a prominent and notorious centre of that faith, and its people must be the first victims. If we put ourselves for a moment in the place of the new ministers, it is not difficult to realize the anxious thought which this movement, even more than the question of the new edict mentioned above, must have caused them. Bigotry and fanaticism are terrible foes to fight, and, in this particular instance, the trouble must have been increased by the knowledge that any disinclination to proceed to extremities would be set down as something akin to disloyalty to the Emperor and a denial of his divine rights. The ministers with whom I had to deal were large-minded men with liberal views, but they, on their side, had to reckon with important personages, who, after being immured, as their forbears had been for centuries, in the mystic darkness of a prehistoric cloister, were no more fit to face the sunlight of the nineteenth century than those perhaps fabulous batrachians which have whitened for aeons untold, encased in the crevices of the limestone rock. In a little time they were to face it, and they did so gloriously; but the day had not come yet, and they were still purblind. The sudden awakening of a sovereign and his court from the sleep of eight centuries was a wonder which still, after some fifty years, reads like a fairy tale even to those who witnessed it. Among the men who composed it there was no great wealth, no ostentation to dazzle the eye—and yet everything to fascinate the imagination. These men, dwelling in simple houses, living frugally—even poorly—were surrounded by a halo before which the territorial magnates, lords of great castles, with all their pomp and splendour and martial glitter, had to humble themselves. The Kugé believed, and they could make others believe, that for all their apparent poverty and humility they were in some mysterious way trustees for the glory of the Gods, from whom, like their divine Emperor, they claimed descent.