Within the isolating walls and the barred gates the story of the seekers after God is a thrilling one. The intellect of choice spirits, beating like caged eagles the bars of their prisons, yearned for more light and life. "Though an eagle be starving," says the Japanese proverb, "it will not eat grain;" and so, while the mass of the people and even the erudite, were content with ground food--even the chopped straw and husks of materialistic Confucianism and decayed Buddhism--there were noble souls who soared upward to exercise their God-given powers, and to seek nourishment fitted for that human spirit which goeth upward and not downward, and which, ever in restless discontent, seeks the Infinite. Protests of Inquiring Spirits. There is no stronger proof of the true humanity and the innate god-likeness of the Japanese, of their worthiness to hold and their inherent power to win a high place among the nations of the earth, than this longing of a few elect ones for the best that earth could give and Heaven bestow. We find men in travail of spirit, groping after God if haply they might find Him, following the ways of the Spirit along lines different, and in pathways remote, from those laid down by Confucius and his materialistic commentators, or by Buddha and his parodists or caricaturists. The story of the philosophers, who mutinied against the iron clamps and governmentally nourished system of the Séido College expounders, is yet to be fully told.[12] It behooves some Japanese scholar to tell it.