not be taken without stirring up bad feeling and resentment, and the Jesuits, whom Nobunaga had befriended, were the ones to bear the resentment of the Buddhists, whose feelings Nobunaga had so terribly outraged. The time came when they had to pay most dearly for the sins against humanity of which their ally Nobunaga had been guilty.

For Nobunaga himself it could not be pleaded that he had intended to act ad majorem Dei gloriam. Nothing was further from his intentions. He looked upon the Jesuits merely as convenient tools; his own views of religion were sufficiently exposed by the great temple (the Sochenji) which he built, with a stone image, representing himself, placed higher than all the other idols of gods and hotoke, to receive the adoration of the people. A few months later (June 22, 1582) his trusted general, Akechi Mitsuhide, conspired against him, and Nobunaga perished miserably by an assassin's hand.

The successor to Nobunaga's power was his friend and trusted lieutenant, Toyotomi Hideyoshi, the famous Taikosama. Hideyoshi had first come under Nobunaga's influence after the victory at Okehazama, and had become allied with the Dictator's family by marriage. When the news of Nobunaga's death reached him, he was engaged in the Western provinces, reducing the clansmen of Mori Terumoto, and the troops with which Akechi Mitsuhide rose against Nobunaga were troops which Hideyoshi had asked for as reinforcements for himself. When the news reached him, he promptly made peace with his enemies and hurried to the Imperial Capital, where, by a series of triumphs, diplomatic as well as military, he shortly succeeded in getting into his own hands all the powers that Nobunaga had wielded, and a great deal more.

Hideyoshi did not wring the neck of the poor nightingale