Deos, or Deus, as the Portuguese
called him, but Dajus, that is to say, in the Japonian tongue, a lie, or
forgery." They added, "That this God imposed on men a heavy yoke. What
justice was it to punish those who transgressed a law, which it was
impossible to keep? But where was Providence, if the law of Jesus was
necessary to salvation, which suffered fifteen ages to slide away without
declaring it to the most noble part of all the world? Surely a religion,
whose God was partial in the dispensation of his favours, could not
possibly be true; and if the European doctrine had but a shadow of truth
in it, China could never have been so long without the knowledge of it."
These were the principal heads of their accusation, and Xavier reports
them in his letters; but he gives not an account of what answers he
returned, and they are not made known to us by any other hand. Thus,
without following two or three historians, who make him speak according
to their own ideas on all these articles, I shall content myself with
what the saint himself had left in writing. The idolaters, instead of
congratulating their own happiness, that they were enlightened by the
beams of faith, bemoaned the blindness of their ancestors, and cried out
in a lamentable tone, "What! are our forefathers burning in hellfire,
because they did not adore a God who was unknown to them, and observed
not a law which never was declared?" The Bouzas added fuel to their zeal,
by telling them,

"The Portuguese priests were good for nothing, because they could not
redeem a soul from hell; whereas they could do it at their pleasure, by
their fasts and prayers: that eternal punishments either proved the
cruelty or the weakness of the Christian God; his cruelty, if he did not
deliver them, when he had it in his power; his weakness, if he could not
execute what he desired; lastly, that Amida and Xaca were far more
merciful, and of greater power; but that they were only pleased to redeem
from hell those who, during their mortal life, had bestowed magnificent
alms upon the Bonzas."

We are ignorant of all those particular answers of the saint, as I said
above: we only know from his relation, that, concerning the sorrow of the
Japonians for having been bereft for so many ages of Christian knowledge,
he had the good fortune to give them comfort, and put them in a way of
more reasonable thoughts; for he shewed them in general, that the most
ancient of all laws is the law of G