Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/140

 diced verdict. The Taikō, like all Japanese of his era, was without any experience of international intercourse, but his statecraft rose to the height of genius. It is inconceivable that a man of such profound insight could fail to detect the political import of the credentials from secular authorities with which the Jesuit fathers came provided, or to appreciate the material character that the conquests of the Cross might be made to assume. He had learned by heart every lesson that the annals of his own country could teach. He knew how Buddhism, originally an instrument in the hands of Japanese statesmen, had ultimately defied their authority, raised itself even above the Imperial Court, and developed military strength with which the most powerful feudal nobles hesitated to cross swords. The story of the very sect against which the animosity of his leader and patron, Oda Nobunaga, burned most relentlessly, showed what even a creed of gentle tenets and refining influences like Buddhism might become in the hands of militant propagandists. He perceived that Christianity evinced nothing of the eclecticism or adaptability which had prevented a collision between Buddhism and the ancestral cult of the Japanese. He saw that the Jesuit fathers spurned all compromise; that the disciple of every other faith was to them an infidel, a pagan, a child of the devil; that their fierce zeal, heated white in fires of which no reflection had yet been cast on the