more than Christianity
expressed with differing pronunciation and vocabulary. To him who will
receive it, the mastery of any one of the languages of Christendom, is,
in a large sense, a revelation of God in Christ Jesus.

Seekers after God.

Pathetic, even to the compulsion of tears, is the story of these seekers
after God. We, who to-day are surrounded by every motive and inducement
to Christian living and by every means and appliance for the practice of
the Christian life, may well consider for a moment the struggle of
earnest souls to find out God. Think of this one who finds a Latin Bible
cast up on the shore from some broken ship, and bearing it secretly in
his bosom to the Hollander, gains light as to the meaning of its
message. Think of the nobleman, Watanabe Oboru,[16] who, by means of the
Japanese interpreter of Dutch, Takano Choyei, is thrilled with the story
of Jesus of Nazareth who helped and healed and spake as no other man
spake, teaching with an authority above that of the masters Confucius or
Buddha. Think of the daimi[=o] of Mito,[17] who, proud in lineage,
learned and scholarly, and surrounded by a host of educated men, is yet
unsatisfied with what the wise of his own country could give him, and
gathers around him the relics unearthed from the old persecutions. From
a picture of the Virgin, a fragment of a litany, or it may be a part of
a breviary, he tries to make out what Christianity is.

Think of Yokoi Heishiro,[18] learned in Confucius and his commentators,
who seeks better light, sends to China for a Chinese translation of the
New Testament, and in his lectures on the Confucian ethics, to the
delight and yet to the surprise of his hearers who hear grander truth
than they are able to find in text or commentary, really preaches
Christ, and prophesies that the time will come when the walls of
isolation being levelled, the brightest intellects of Japan will welcome
this same Jesus and His doctrine. Think of him again, when unable to
purify the Augean stables of Yedo's moral corruption, because the time
was at hand for other cleansing agencies, he retires to his home,
content awhile with his books and flowers. Again, see him summoned to
the capital, to sit at Ki[=o]to--like aged Franklin among the young
statesmen of the Constitution in Philadelphia--with the Mikado's
youthful advisers in the new government of 1868. Think of him pleading
for the elevation of the pariah Eta, accursed and outcast