The history of the brief existence of Christianity in Japan and of the terrible persecution by which it was utterly extirpated in that island, is at once a melancholy and a glorious episode in the annals of the Church. In the Japanese we behold the most highly-gifted of the Asiatic races of modern times receiving the Gospel with a joy and a fervour which remind us of primitive ages, when thousands in one single day would run at the divine call to fill the apostolic net, and when the multitude of the faithful, serving God with one heart and one soul, resembled rather the chosen few who in later days have left the crowd to follow the higher path of evangelical perfection, than the mass of ordinary believers. But if the Japanese excite our admiration in their willing reception of gospel-truth, and their fervour in obeying its precepts and counsels, no less, or rather still more exalted are the feelings with which we must regard the spirit in which they met the fiery trial which came upon them. Never in the times of the old pagan persecutions was a more glorious spectacle exhibited of men, women, and children, rushing to claim the martyr's palm, and seeking sufferings and torments as others seek honours and pleasures. Wonderful are the ways of the Almighty, and inscrutable as wonderful! The conversion of China, for which S. Francis Xavier, the apostle of the Indies, had long and ardently sighed, was denied to his prayers; while that of Japan, of which apparently he had never even dreamed, was given to him unasked. China was the object of all his wishes and aspirations,--the promised land of his spiritual ambition. It was in his dreams by night and his thoughts by day,--the subject alike of his penance and of his prayers; when a young Japanese, tormented by remorse of conscience for a crime committed years ago, and forgotten probably by everybody but himself, arrived at Malacca, where the Saint then was, and throwing himself at his feet, besought of him that peace and pardon which his native bonzes had been unable to bestow. The great heart of Francis exulted at the prospect of winning another empire to the banner of his Divine Lord; while his vivid faith saw in the sinner who had thus sought him from afar a direct ambassador from Heaven, which had doubtless pursued this youth with the fear of retribution, not for his sake alone, but also to effect the conversion of the idolatrous nation represented in his person. Two years afterwards, on the Feast of the Assumption (1549), he and his chosen companion, Father Cosmas de Torres, landed at Kagoxima, the birthplace of the youth who had come to Francis, and who, under his new name of Paul, accompanied the fathers as their guide and interpreter to the nations of Japan.