Japan and the Japanese

CATHOLIC QUARRELS. 181
priests had secretly fished up their bones and preserved
them foi
relics. There were many more in prison, expecting hourly to die ;
for, as Cocks wrote, very few turned pagans.
Nagasaki had been from its foundation a Catholic city. Hith-
erto, notwithstanding former edicts for their destruction, one or
two churches and monasteries had escaped ; but, in 1621, all that
were left, including the hospital of Misericordia, were destroyed.
The very graves and sepulchres, so Cocks wrote, had been dug up ;
and, as if to root out all memory of Christianity, heathen temples
were built on their sites.
One of thebJesuits wrote home that there was not now any question
as to the number of Jesuit residences in Japan, but only as to the
number of prisons. Even those who had not yet fallen into the hands
of the persecutors had only caves and holes in the rocks for their
dwellings, in which they
suffered more than in the darkest
dungeons.
It is not necessary to give implicit credit to all which the con-
temporary letters and memoirs related, and which the Catholic historians
and martyrologists have repeated, of the ferocity of the
persecutors, the heroism of the sufferers, and especially of the mir-
acles said to be wrought by their relics. Yet there can be no
question, either of the fury of the persecution, or of the lofty spirit
of martyrdom in which it was unavailingly met. Catholicism
lingered on for a few years longer in it Japan, yet must be considered
as having already received its death-blow in that same year in
which a few Puritan pilgrims landed at Plymouth, to plant the
obscure seeds of a new and still growing Protestant empire.
16