Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/141

 horizon of Japan, drove them from the outset to excesses of intolerance presaging a national catastrophe as soon as Buddhism found itself forced to fight for its life. The Taikō owed much of his remarkable success to a fine sense of proportion. He possessed the gift of measuring with precision the strength of offence or defence that a given combination of men or things would develop under certain contingencies. Nothing is more improbable than that he underestimated the immense potentialities for resistance, or, if need be, for aggressive destructiveness, possessed by Japanese Buddhism in his time; an imperium in imperio, dowered with vast stores of wealth, wielding a military organisation which, were its various parts combined against a common foe, would hold the whole realm at its mercy, and historically capable of efforts so strong even for the petty purposes of a sectarian squabble that their supreme exercise in a life-and-death struggle with Christianity could not be contemplated without the gravest misgivings. Vaguely, perhaps, but still in outlines sufficiently distinct to suggest a lurid picture, these eventualities must have presented themselves to his strong intelligence, and as the cries of dying priests and the crash of falling temples reached his ears from Kiushiu where the Christian propagandists were harrying their opponents with the faggot and the sword, he may well have begun to appreciate the dimensions of the impending catastrophe.