_Preaching of Xavier—Pinto’s Third Visit to Japan—A. D. 1550-51._
It is not our purpose to trace minutely the progress and fluctuating
fortunes of the Jesuit missionaries; nor, indeed, would it always
be easy to extract the exact truth from relations into which the
marvellous so largely enters. Xavier’s letters throw very little
light on the subsequent history of his mission, which mainly depends
upon accounts derived from an inquisition into the particulars of
the apostle’s ministry and miracles in the East, ordered to be made
shortly after his death by John III., of Portugal, and which resulted
in a large collection of duly attested depositions, containing
many marvellous statements, most of them purporting to come from
eye-witnesses, from which source the Jesuit historians of the Eastern
missions and the biographers of the saint have drawn most of their
materials.
If we are to believe them, Xavier was not only always victorious in his
disputes with bonzes; he went even so far, shortly after his arrival in
Japan, as to raise the dead—a miracle which furnished Poussin with a
subject for a celebrated picture. Xavier, we are told, had been charged
in India with a similar interference with the laws of nature; it is
true he attempted to explain it away, as, perhaps, he would have done
this Japanese miracle; but that denial the historian Maffei thinks,
instead of disproving the miracle, only proves the modest humility of
Xavier.
Though at first well received, as we have seen, by the king of Satsuma,
and though, in the course of near a year he remained there, the
immediate family and many of the relations of Anjirō were persuaded
to be baptized, yet the remonstrances of the bonzes, followed by the
transfer of the Portuguese trade, for the sake of a better harbor,
from Kagoshima to Hirado, caused the king of Satsuma to issue an edict
forbidding his subjects, under pain of death, to renounce the worship
of their national gods. In consequence of this edict, Xavier departed
for Hirado, which island, off the west coast of Shimo, having separated
from the kingdom of Hizen, had become independent under a prince of its
own. Anjirō was left behind, but soon afterwards was obliged to fly to
China, where, as Pinto informs us, he was killed by robbers.
At Hirado, in consequence of the representations of the Portuguese
merchants, Xavier was well received; but, desirous to see the chief
city of Japan, leaving Torres behind, he set out with Fernandez and two
Japanese converts on a visit to Miyako.
Proceeding by water, he touched first at Hakata, a considerable town on
the northwest coast of Shimo, and capital of the kingdom of Chikuzen,
and then at Yamaguchi, at that time a large city, capital of Nagato,
the most western kingdom or province of the great island of Nippon,
separated at this point from Shimo by a narrow strait.
The populace of Yamaguchi, ridiculing Xavier’s mean appearance as
contrasted with his pretensions, drove him out of the city with curses
and stones. Winter had now set in, and the cold was severe. The coast
was infested by pirates, and the interior by robbers, which obliged
the saint to travel as servant to some merchants, who, themselves on
horseback, required him, though on foot, and loaded with a heavy box
of theirs, to keep up with them at full gallop. This, however, seems a
little exaggerated, as Japanese travellers on horseback never exceed a
walk; while the box which Xavier carried is represented by the earlier
writers as containing the sacred vessels for the sacrifice of the mass.
Arriving thus at Miyako in rather sad plight, Xavier found that capital
almost ruined by civil wars, and on the eve of becoming the field of a
new battle. He could obtain no audience, as he had hoped, either of the
Kubō-Sama or of the Shaku, nor any hearing except from the populace, so
that he judged it best to return again to Hirado.
There are two means of working upon the imagination, both of which are
employed by turns alike by the Romish and by the Buddhist clergy. One
is by showing a contempt not merely for elegances, but even for common
comforts and ordinary decencies: the other, by pomp, show, and display.
Xavier, on his way to Miyako, entered the city of Yamaguchi barefoot
and meanly clad, and had, as we have stated, been hooted and stoned
by the populace. He now returned thither again from Hirado handsomely
clothed, and taking with him certain presents and recommendatory
letters from the Portuguese viceroy of the Indies and the governor of
Malacca, addressed to the Japanese princes, but of which as yet he had
made no use. Demanding an audience of the king, he was received with
respect, and soon obtained leave to preach, and an unoccupied house
of the bonzes to live in. Here, being soon surrounded by crowds, he
renewed, say his biographers, the miracle of tongues, not only in
preaching fluently in Japanese and in Chinese to the numerous merchants
of that nation who traded there, but in being able by a single answer
to satisfy a multitude of confused questions which the eager crowd
simultaneously put to him. Such was his success that, in less than two
months, five hundred persons, most of them of consideration, received
baptism; and, though the king soon began to grow less favorable, the
converts increased, during less than a year that he remained there, to
three thousand.
The seed thus planted, Xavier resolved to return to the Indies for
a fresh supply of laborers; and, having heard of the arrival of a
Portuguese vessel at Fuchū, in the kingdom of Bungo, leaving De Torres
and Fernandez at Yamaguchi, he proceeded to Fuchū for the purpose of
embarking.
Among the merchants in this ship was Fernam Mendez Pinto, now in Japan
for the third time, and who gives at some length the occurrences that
took place after Xavier’s arrival at Fuchū, where he was received with
great respect by the Portuguese, of whom more than thirty went out on
horseback to meet him.
The young king, whose name was Kiuan,[39] had already obtained,
through intercourse with Portuguese merchants, some knowledge of their
religion. He invited Xavier to an audience, to which the Portuguese
merchants accompanied him with so grand a display as somewhat to shock
the modesty of the saint, but which strongly impressed in his favor
the people of Bungo, to whom he had been represented by the bonzes
as so miserable a vagabond as to disgust the very vermin with which
he was covered. The young king received him very graciously; and he
preached and disputed with such success as greatly to alarm the bonzes,
who vainly attempted to excite a popular commotion against him as an
enchanter, through whose mouth a demon spoke, and a cannibal, who fed
on dead bodies which he dug up in the night.
Finally, after conquering, in a long dispute before the king of
Bungo, the ablest and most celebrated champion of the bonzes,[40] and
converting several of the order to the faith, Xavier embarked for
Goa on the 20th of September, 1551, attended by two of his Japanese
converts. Of those one died at Goa. The other, named Bernard, proceeded
to Europe, and, after a visit to Rome, returned to Portugal, and,
having entered the Society of Jesus, closed his life at the Jesuit
college of Coimbra, a foundation endowed by John III for the support of
a hundred pupils, to be prepared as missionaries to the East.
At Yamaguchi, after Xavier’s departure, the bonzes, enemies of
Catholicity, were more successful. An insurrection which they raised
so alarmed the king, that he shut himself up in his palace, set it
on fire, and, having slain his only son with his own hand, ended by
cutting himself open. The missionaries, however, were saved by an
unconverted princess, who even induced certain bonzes to shelter them;
and a brother of the king of Bungo having been elected king of Nagato,
the Catholics, not one of whom, we are told, had been killed in the
insurrection, were soon on a better footing than ever.[41]