Japan and the Japanese

CHAPTER VII.
PREACHING OP XAVIER. PINTO'S THIRD VISIT TO JAPAN. A. D. 1550-81.
IT is not our purpose to trace minutely the progress and fluctu-
ating fortunes of the Jesuit missionaries ; nor, indeed, would it always
be easy to extract the exact truth from relations into which the
marvellous so largely enters. Xavier's .letters throw very little
light on the subsequent history of his mission, which mainly depends
upon accounts derived from an inquisition into the particulars of
the apostle's ministry and miracles in the East, ordered to be made
shortly after his death by John III., of Portugal, and which resulted
in a large collection of duly attested depositions, containing many
marvellous statements, most of them purporting to come from eyewitnesses,
from which source the Jesuit historians of the eastern
missions and the biographers of the saint have drawn most of their
materials.
If we are to believe them, Xavier was not only always victorious
in his disputes with the bonzes ; he went even so far, shortly after
his arrival in Japan, as to raise the dead a miracle which furnished
Poussin with a subject for a celebrated picture. Xavier, we are
told, had been charged in India with a similar interference with the
laws of nature ; it is true he attempted to explain it away, as,
perhaps, he would have done this Japanese miracle ;
but that denial
the historian Maffei thinks, instead of disproving the miracle, only
proves the modest humility of Xavier.
Though at first well received, as we have seen, by the king of
Satsuma, and though, in the course of near a year that he remained
there, the immediate family and many of the relations of Angiro
were persuaded to be baptized, yet the remonstrances of the bonzes,
followed by the transfer of the Portuguese trade, for the sake of a