connected with the Temple of Confucius on Yushimadai in Hongo), and from the middle of the seventeenth century we get a lay-Confucianism which, in process of time, completely overshadows the priestly Confucianism, to which it becomes almost hostile.

The Shintoists were but of little account at the beginning of the Tokugawa age. But Hideyoshi had patronized them, and Hideyoshi remained for Japan a beau ideal of knightly virtues. Very few samurai ever found much to content their souls in the life and teachings of Buddhism; only here and there was there a studious soldier to be found to whom the bookish habits of the Confucianist appealed with anything like the voice of attraction. Shintoism, with a slight flavour of philosophy, a vague but deep-seated religiosity, a good deal of common sense, and a strong appeal to Japanese pride, satisfied most minds, without demanding from them the adoption of any denominational designation. It was destined in the

course of years to become a very potent factor in the development of the country.

Only two factors were excluded from the new national life--the Catholics, and the extreme left wing of the intolerant Nichirenists. Ieyasu found it necessary in 1610 to inflict a most severe punishment on some Nichiren monks who had been speaking too freely against Christians and the inoffensive Jodo believers, and Iemitsu felt himself obliged to proscribe the Fujufuze branch of the Nichirenists, exactly as he did the believers in Catholicism.

Every one knows (who has read anything of Japanese history) that the persecutions of Christians were of a most severe and cruel character, and that the Buddhist clergy became the willing instruments of the Shogunate in the execution of a cruel legislation. No noblemen or persons of any position survived that ordeal, except through apostasy: a few of them were martyred, the rest saved their lives through a timely return to the religion of their fathers. It was reserved for the farmers of Kyushu to set an example of heroism under persecution worthy of the earliest ages of the Christian Church. Without priests, without sacraments, except the Baptism which they kept up amongst themselves, without any of

the aids that are used for maintaining the Christian life, and obliged to practise their religion in the strictest secrecy, in daily peril of torture and death, these brave men clung tenaciously to the hope of the Gospel, and when, in 1859, the French missionaries discovered them in the neighbourhood of Nagasaki, they were keeping their Lent with simplicity and reverence.

But all this was not known to the Shogunal authorities. Christianity had disappeared from the surface of affairs, and had ceased to be a force to be reckoned with by the statesman. And when the noisy left wing of the Nichirenist extremists had been silenced, the land seemed at peace.