But the Regent must have felt that Nichiren was in the right. His conscience troubled him after he had passed the sentence of death, and he sent a messenger post haste after the executioner's cavalcade to revoke the condemnation, and changed the sentence to one of banishment to the distant island of Sado. The messenger arrived only just in time. The mats were already spread for the prisoner to kneel on while waiting for the fatal stroke, the prisoner was already kneeling on the mat, and his faithful disciples held, and have ever since held, that their master was given back to them from the dead. Legend has been busy with the embellishment of the story. The executioner, it was said, had already lifted his sword, when a flash of lightning from a cloudless sky rendered the blow innocuous. Before he had recovered for a second stroke, the messenger from the Regent had arrived and the danger was past.

The exile in Sado was not of long duration. Nichiren returned in 1272, busily warning the nation about the danger of the Mongol invasion. When asked by the officers of the Kingo, or body-guard, what reasons he had for his predictions of evil, he replied that he had general Scriptural authority for what he said, and that he had come to his particular conclusions as to time, etc., through

[paragraph continues] "discerning the face of the heavens." He now bore a charmed life, and was quite secure in the affection of his followers. His later years were devoted to Minobu and Ikegami, the two monasteries especially connected with the memories of his personality, and at the latter he passed to his rest, in the year 1282. His had been an eventful life. He still has, among his countrymen, many friends and many detractors. To the outsider, who studies him impartially, he will always appear as a fearless man who had the courage of his convictions.

Now let us turn to the theological remedy which Nichiren proposed for the ills both of Church and State.

It was his great idea to restore S'akyamuni (not in his temporal manifestation in fleshly form, but as the Eternal and Infinite) to his proper place in the Buddhist Heavens. False brethren, calling themselves Buddhists, had given to S'akyamuni a place of inferiority. They had spoken of him as only a temporary manifestation of a part of the glories of some other Buddha, Amitabha or Vairoc'ana, greater than himself, and the simpler Sutras of the Hinayana they had despised as containing a simplified Gospel watered down to suit the intelligence of the ill-instructed. Nichiren reversed the position. He had been much shocked on one of his journeys to find some children playing with an idol of S'akyamuni which had been discarded from the temple to make room for a newfangled image of Amida, and he was resolved to make reparation for the insult which had thus been offered to the lawful Lord of Buddhism. "S'akyamuni," he said,