Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/129

 sorting to the fires of persecution and the cross of the martyr with all the merciless vehemence of contemporary Europe, and that the story of their doings was thus projected upon the pages of history in shocking outlines. But the mood ultimately educated by the conduct of the Christian propagandists differed widely from the mood with which they were originally welcomed. That fact cannot be too emphatically asserted. If these Portuguese and Spanish apostles of the Nazarene, together with their Japanese disciples, fell victims at the last to the wrath of the nation whose heart they had come to win, the cause is to be sought in their own faults and in the intrigues of their foreign rivals rather than in the prejudice or bigotry of the Japanese. They taught to Japan the intolerance which she subsequently displayed towards themselves, and they provoked its display by their own imprudence.

The historical bases of these propositions are easily traced. During the interval of two hundred and sixty-one years— to —that separated the great Mongol invasion of Japan from the opening of intercourse between the latter and Europe, the spirit of lawless adventure prevalent throughout the Occident found its counterpart in the conduct of the Japanese. It might be supposed that their lust for fighting would have been amply sated by the perpetual domestic combats that kept their own country in a ferment from shore to shore. But although