ind 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 Seido College
expounders, is yet to be fully told.[12] It behooves some Japanese
scholar to tell it.

How earnest truth-seeking Japanese protested and rebelled against the
economic fallacies, against the political despotism, against the
abominable usurpations, against the false strategies and against the
inherent immoralities of the Tokugawa system, has of late years been set
forth with tantalizing suggestiveness, but only in fragments, by the
native historians. Heartrending is the narrative of these men who
studied, who taught, who examined, who sifted the mountains of chaff in
the native literature and writings, who made long journeys on foot all
over the country, who furtively travelled in Korea and China, who
boarded Dutch and Russian vessels, who secretly read forbidden books,
who tried to improve their country and their people. These men saw that
their country was falling behind not only the nations of the West, but,
as it seemed to them, even the nations of the East. They felt that
radical changes were necessary in order to reform the awful poverty,
disease, licentiousness, national weakness, decay of bodily powers, and
the creeping paralysis of the Samurai intellect and spirit. How they
were ostracized, persecuted, put under ban, hounded by the spies, thrown
into prison; how they died of starvation or of disease; how they were
beheaded, crucified, or compelled to commit _hara-kiri_; how their books
were purged by the censors, or put under ban or destroyed,[13] and their
maps, writings and plates burned, has not yet been told. It is a story
that, when fully narrated, will make a volume of extraordinary interest.
It is a story which both Christian and human interests challenge some
native author to tell. During all this time, but especially during the
first half of the nineteenth century, there was one steady goal to which
the aspiring student ever kept his faith, and to which his feet tended.
There was one place of pilgrimage, toward which the sons of the morning
moved, and which, despite the spy and the informer and the vigilance of