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Rh more than 120,000 enrolled believers, who represented a Christian community of about twice that number. Christian preachers and churches were all over the empire, and a Gospel ship was cruising about in the Inland Sea. According to the Constitution, religious belief is free; so that Christianity was becoming more and more a power in the land and wielding in society an influence that cannot be measured. And in 1901 Japanese troops, in alliance with those of nations of Christendom, had rescued Christian missionaries and Chinese converts from the fury of mobs and soldiery, and Christian missionaries, driven out of China, had found safe and comfortable places of refuge in Japan.

Such comparisons might be carried out with regard to many other items and in greater detail; but these will, perhaps, suffice as illustrations of the extent to which Japan was transformed during the nineteenth century. In some points, of course, especially in modern inventions, there has been no greater change than in Occidental nations during the same period. But it should be carefully borne in mind that these transformations, in geographical, agricultural, mineral, industrial, commercial, manufacturing, social, economic, political, legal, educational, moral, and religious affairs, so far as they have gone, are not temporary or superficial, but permanent and thorough; there is to be no retrogression. Japan has deliberately and firmly started out, not only to march along with the other so-called civilized nations, but also to contribute