Japan and the Japanese

SEVERITY OF THE PERSECUTION. 187
greatly diminished the dignity of its fall, was the still hot jealousy
and mutual hatred of the Jesuits and of the friars, inflamed rather
than quenched by all this common danger and suffering. The bishop
of Japan having died (it was said of grief, at the peril of his flock)
just as the persecution broke out, a most unseemly quarrel arose,
which was curried on for several years with great virulence, as to the
administration of the bishopric. It was claimed, on the one hand, by
Father Corvailho, the provincial of the Jesuits, under an authority
from the Pope ; and, on the other, by Father Pierre Baptiste, a Fran-
ciscan, as vicar-general of the archbishop of Manilla, to whose jurisdiction
it was pretended the bishopric of Japan appertained. This
quarrel about the administration of the bishopric was finally settled
by the Pope in favor of the Jesuits.
The Jesuit seminaries in Japan being broken up, they had organized
one at Macao for the education of Japanese ecclesiastics ; but
the severe penalties denounced against all priests coming into Japan,
and against all, whether natives or foreigners, who should shelter
them after their arrival, made the existence of the church, and the
celebration of divine service, every day more precarious. From
year to year it grew more and more difficult for new missionaries to
get landed, great as was the zeal for that service. Of those
who did land, the
greater part were immediately seized and put to
death. Large rewards were offered to any person who would betray
or take a missionary. Those already in the country lived in hourly
danger of arrest, forced to conceal themselves in cellars, holes and
caverns and the huts of lepers, exposing to tortures and death all
who might bring them food, or in any way assist in
concealing
them. The greatness of their
sufferings does not depend merely
upon the testimony of their own letters. Roger Gysbert, a Dutch
Protestant and a resident in Japan, between the years 1622 and
1629, wrote an affecting narrative of it, and the general fact is
strongly stated in Caron's account of Japan written a few years
later.
Gysbert, in his narrative,* relates the martyrdom of more than
five hundred persons ; but there was a still larger amount of suf-
fering which terminated not in martyrdom,- but in recantntion. The
* It may be found in Thevenot's Collection of Voyages, also u Voyages det
Indes, tom. v.