mass. Long before the United States, or Commodore Perry, the
Hollanders advised the Yodo government in favor of international
intercourse. The Dutch language, nearest in structure and vocabulary to
the English, even richer in the descriptive energy of its terms, and
saturated withal with Christian truth, was studied by eager young men.
These speakers of an impersonal language which in psychological
development was scarcely above the grade of childhood, were exercised in
a tongue that stands second to none in Europe for purity, vigor,
personality and philosophical power. The Japanese students of Dutch held
a golden key which opened the treasures of modern thought and of the
world's literature. The minds of thinking Japanese were thus made
plastic for the reception of the ideas of Christianity. Best of all,
though forbidden by their contracts to import Bibles into Japan, the
Dutchmen, by means of works of reference, pointed more than one
inquiring spirit to the information by which the historic Christ became
known. The books which they imported, the information which they gave,
the stimulus which they imparted, were as seeds planted within
masonry-covered earth, that were to upheave and overthrow the fabric of
exclusion and inclusion reared by the Tokugawa Sh[=o]guns.

Time and space fail us to tell how eager spirits not only groped after
God, but sought the living Christ--though often this meant to them
imprisonment, suicide enforced by the law, or decapitation. Yet over all
Japan, long before the broad pennant of Perry was mirrored on the waters
of Yedo Bay, there were here and there masses of leavened opinion, spots
of kindled light, and fields upon which the tender green sprouts of new
ideas could be detected. To-day, as inquiry among the oldest of the
Christian leaders and scores of volumes of modern biography shows, the
most earnest and faithful among the preachers, teachers and soldiers in
the Christian army, were led into their new world of ideas through Dutch
culture. The fact is revealed in repeated instances, that, through
father, grandfather, uncle, or other relative--some pilgrim to the Dutch
at Nagasaki--came their first knowledge, their initial promptings, the
environment or atmosphere, which made them all sensitive and ready to
receive the Christian truth when it came in its full form from the
living missionary and the vital word of God. Some one has well said that
the languages of modern Europe are nothing