h as
it was, Portuguese Christianity confronted the worst condition of
affairs, morally, intellectually and materially, which Japan has known
in historic times. Defective as the critic must pronounce the system of
religion imported from Europe, it was immeasurably superior to anything
that the Japanese had hitherto known.

It must be said, also, that Portuguese Christianity in Japan tried to do
something more than the mere obtaining of adherents or the nominal
conversion of the people.[26] It attempted to purify and exalt their
life, to make society better, to improve the relations between rulers
and ruled; but it did not attempt to do what it ought to have done. It
ignored great duties and problems, while it imitated too fully, not only
the example of the kings of this world in Europe but also of the rulers
in Japan. In the presence of soldier-like Buddhist priests, who had made
war their calling, it would have been better if the Christian
missionaries had avoided their bad example, and followed only in the
footsteps of the Prince of Peace; but they did not. On the contrary,
they brought with them the spirit of the Inquisition then in full blast
in Spain and Portugal, and the machinery with which they had been
familiar for the reclamation of native and Dutch "heretics." Xavier,
while at Goa, had even invoked the secular arm to set up the Inquisition
in India, and doubtless he and his followers would have put up this
infernal enginery in Japan if they could have done so. They had stamped
and crushed out "heresy" in their own country, by a system of hellish
tortures which in its horrible details is almost indescribable. The
rusty relics now in the museums of Europe, but once used in church
discipline, can be fully appreciated only by a physician or an
anatomist. In Japan, with the spirit of Alva and Philip II., these
believers in the righteousness of the Inquisition attacked violently the
character of native bonzes, and incited their converts to insult the
gods, destroy the Buddhist images, and burn or desecrate the old
shrines. They persuaded the daimi[=o]s, when these lords had become
Christians, to compel their subjects to embrace their religion on pain
of exile or banishment. Whole districts were ordered to become
Christian. The bonzes were exiled or killed, and fire and sword as well
as preaching, were employed as means of conversion. In ready imitation
of the Buddhists, fictitious miracles were frequently got up to