Note (return) — Chapter XII · - TWO CENTURIES OF SILENCE

Think of Yokoi Héishiro,18 learned in Confucius and his commentators, who seeks better light, sends to China for a Chinese translation of the New Testament, and in his lectures on the Confucian ethics, to the delight and yet to the surprise of his hearers who hear grander truth than they are able to find in text or commentary, really preaches Christ, and prophesies that the time will come when the walls of isolation being levelled, the brightest intellects of Japan will welcome this same Jesus and His doctrine. Think of him again, when unable to purify the Augean stables of Yedo's moral corruption, because the time was at hand for other cleansing agencies, he retires to his home, content awhile with his books and flowers. Again, see him summoned to the capital, to sit at Kiōto—like aged Franklin among the young statesmen of the Constitution in Philadelphia—with the Mikado's youthful advisers in the new government of 1868. Think of him pleading for the elevation of the pariah Eta, accursed and outcast through Buddhism, to humanity and citizenship. Then hear him urge eloquently the right of personal belief, and argue for toleration under the law, of opinions, which the Japanese then stigmatized as "evil" and devilish, but which we, and many of them now, call sound and Christian. Finally, behold him at night in the public streets, assaulted by assassins, and given quick death by their bullet and blades. See his gray head lying severed from his body and in its own gore, the wretched murderers thinking they have stayed the advancing tide of Christianity; but at home there dwells a little son destined in God's providence to become an earnest Christian and one of the brilliant leaders of the native Christianity of Japan in our day.