Page:Brinkley - Japan - Volume 3.djvu/146

 been required to consider that outcome of missionary enterprise in China. A cognate problem forced itself on the attention of Japanese statesmen from a very early period. The Emperor Shirakawa (1073–1087), who, at the zenith of his power, complained that only three things in his realm defied his authority,—the chances of the dice, the waters of the Kamo River, and the priests of Buddha,—was ultimately obliged to invoke the assistance of the military nobles against the contumacious proceedings of the Buddhist prelates, thus inaugurating between the followers of the sword and the disciples of the sutras an era of feuds which culminated in the fierce exterminations resorted to by Oda Nobunaga. From the outset a similar spirit of independence was educated by Christian propagandism in Japan. It is characteristic of human nature that men conspicuously prone to encroach upon the sphere of another's rights are proportionately conservative of their own. The Roman Catholic priest's stout defiance of pagan interference in the foreign fields of his labour was but another form of the zeal that impelled him to protect orthodoxy with the faggot and the rack in Europe. Iyeyasu mounted the administrative throne at a time when these things forced themselves upon political attention. He had seen Franciscan monks trample upon the veto of the Taikō within the very shadow of the latter's castle. He had seen Christians in Nagasaki successfully ignore the