raised the banner of the Virgin and called on all Christians and others
to follow him. Probably as many as thirty thousand men, women and
children, but without a single foreigner, lay or clerical, among them,
gathered from parts of Kiushiu. After burning Shint[=o] and Buddhist
temples, they fortified an old abandoned castle at Shimabara, resolving
to die rather than submit. Against an army of veterans, led by skilled
commanders, the fortress held out during four months. At last, after a
bloody assault, it was taken, and men, women and children were
slaughtered.[22] Thousands suffered death at the point of the spear and
sword; many were thrown into the sea; and others were cast into boiling
hot springs, emblems of the eight Buddhist Hells.

All efforts were now put forth to uproot not only Christianity but also
everything of foreign planting. The Portuguese were banished and the
death penalty declared against all who should return, The ai no ko, or
half-breed children, were collected and shipped by hundreds to Macao.
All persons adopting or harboring Eurasians were to be banished, and
their relatives punished. The Christian cause now became like the doomed
city of Babylon or like the site of Nineveh, which, buried in the sand
and covered with the desolation and silence of centuries, became lost to
the memory of the world, so that even the very record of scripture was
the jest of the infidel, until the spade of Layard brought them again to
resurrection. So, Japanese Christianity, having vanished in blood, was
supposed to have no existence, thus furnishing Mr. Lecky with arguments
to prove the extirpative power of persecution.[23]

Yet in 1859, on the opening of the country by treaty, the Roman Catholic
fathers at Nagasaki found to their surprise that they were re-opening
the old mines, and that their work was in historic continuity with that
of their predecessors. The blood of the martyrs had been the seed of the