of Jesus of Nazareth who helped and healed and spake as no other man
spake, teaching with an authority above that of the masters Confucius or
Buddha. Think of the daimi[=o] of Mito,[17] who, proud in lineage,
learned and scholarly, and surrounded by a host of educated men, is yet
unsatisfied with what the wise of his own country could give him, and
gathers around him the relics unearthed from the old persecutions. From
a picture of the Virgin, a fragment of a litany, or it may be a part of
a breviary, he tries to make out what Christianity is.

Think of Yokoi Héishiro,[18] learned in Confucius and his commentators,
who seeks better light, sends to China for a Chinese translation of the
New Testament, and in his lectures on the Confucian ethics, to the
delight and yet to the surprise of his hearers who hear grander truth
than they are able to find in text or commentary, really preaches
Christ, and prophesies that the time will come when the walls of
isolation being levelled, the brightest intellects of Japan will welcome
this same Jesus and His doctrine. Think of him again, when unable to
purify the Augean stables of Yedo's moral corruption, because the time
was at hand for other cleansing agencies, he retires to his home,
content awhile with his books and flowers. Again, see him summoned to
the capital, to sit at Ki[=o]to--like aged Franklin among the young
statesmen of the Constitution in Philadelphia--with the Mikado's
youthful advisers in the new government of 1868. Think of him pleading
for the elevation of the pariah Eta, accursed and outcast through
Buddhism, to humanity and citizenship. Then hear him urge eloquently the
right of personal belief, and argue for toleration under the law, of
opinions, which the Japanese then stigmatized as "evil" and devilish,
but which we, and many of them now, call sound and Christian. Finally,
behold him at night in the public streets, assaulted by assassins, and
given quick death by their bullet and blades. See his gray head lying