The Lives of the Saints, Volume II (of 16): February

So the little seed of the Word of God was sown in Japan, and from the time of this visit, Jesuits freely entered Japan, and were established by Papal brief as the chief missionaries for that country. Their eminent success is said to have been based upon their invariably laying down a solid educational foundation, and securing the careful training of the scholars who flocked to them. To each mission were attached a public school, in which Christian doctrine, literature, and ecclesiastical and secular music were taught, and wherever unusual capacity was evinced, the missionaries gathered those boys together in their own houses, and there instructed them how to make mental prayer, to practise virtue, to avoid and overcome sin, and excite the spirit of penance. Every Friday the boys went in procession to the churches, singing psalms and motetts. In this way, the fervour generally induced by corporal austerities, and the generous, uncalculating devotedness flowing from the continual thought of Christ's Passion, sprang up in full vigour from the very beginning of the missions, and ripened to its legitimate harvest, while to die for Christ became the habitual aspiration of the child-neophytes of Japan.

Meanwhile, no foreboding of coming reverses, or dread of trials which might prove fatal, hindered the generous missionaries from their work. Like the Apostles and their early successors, they went about from day to day, literally fulfilling our Lord's commands to carry neither purse nor scrip, nor to provide two coats, nor to abide in any one place, except for the good of the souls around them. When persecutions sprang up in one town or territory, they took their crucifixes and their breviaries in their hands, and went on to another, doing whatever good was nearest at hand, and leaving all the consequences of it to God to make fruitful or not. As in the early ages of the Church, noble women were continually raised up to do great things for Christ, and to show forth that perfection of love in weakness and childlike faith by which good women so peculiarly glorify God. One of them, Maria Kiogscou, gained two sons, a daughter, and a daughter-in-law to the faith, and her house became the centre of good works and alms-deeds, and a place of meeting for all the upper classes in Osaka, most of whom either actually declared themselves Christians, or shielded and helped those who did. Another noble lady named Julia, being accustomed to frequent the houses of the nobility at Meaco, baptized great numbers of other ladies with her own hands, and instructed a crowd of young people in Christian doctrine. One fact, strikingly like those of the first centuries of the faith, is told of a Japanese physician, who happening to read a book lent by one of the missionaries to a friend of his, became convinced that there was only one true God, but as the book was not one of doctrine, he learnt no more than this for four years. Every morning and evening he knelt down and prayed to the "one true God," and as soon as he knew what to do, he applied for instruction at Osaka, and was baptized.

The persecution, sometime brooding, broke out first in Fingo, and the governor, with assumed gentleness, issued certain papers for all his subjects to sign. Those who firmly refused were seized, carried away from their homes, and banished. They must have taken refuge on some other governor's territory, or on a wild border-land, for the band of exiles built themselves miserable straw-wattled huts, and there lived as they could, without food or necessaries, and deprived of all countenance and sympathy whatever, as any one speaking to them was threatened with severe punishment. In this condition, their courage and constancy was unbroken, and as soon as it was possible, a Japanese Priest, Father Luis, visited them in the disguise of a peasant, and comforted them very much. The bishop then sent them books and other things, with beautiful letters, exhorting them to persevere, looking to the reward they would surely earn. Some of the letters written in return are very touching and beautiful, expressing the strongest desire for martyrdom, and humbly wondering that any among themselves should be reckoned worthy of so great a grace as to be "the first fruits of Japan."

They were at length allowed to depart to the town of Nangasaki, where they were received with tenderness by the bishop and clergy. Scarcely had the exiles reached this asylum, ere another edict was published in Fingo, commanding all the remaining Christians to apostatize. Death was to be the penalty of a refusal; and two noblemen, named John and Simon, were chosen as examples of severity to the rest. Both were friends of the governor to whom the order had been intrusted, and he did what he could to save them. "If they would but feign compliance with the king's decree," or "have the ceremony privately performed at their own houses," or "bribe the bonze to allow it to be supposed that he had received their recantation," – each of these alternatives was as eagerly urged as it was indignantly rejected.

The execution of John took place in the presence of the governor; and from the chamber, still reeking with the blood of one friend, he went to the house of the other on a similar mission, and with equal reluctance.

Simon was quietly conversing with his mother when the governor entered; and the latter could not refrain from beseeching that lady to have pity upon them both, and by advising compliance with the king's commands, to spare herself the anguish of losing a son, and himself that of imbruing his hands in the blood of a friend. The appeal was made in vain; and the governor left the house, indignantly declaring that by her obstinacy she was guilty of the death of her son. Another nobleman entered soon afterwards, charged with the execution of the sentence. Jotivava was a friend of Simon's, and he proceeded with what heart he might to his sad and revolting duty. Knowing his errand well, Simon received him with an affectionate smile, and then prostrated himself in prayer before an image of our Saviour crowned with thorns, while his wife and mother called for warm water that he might wash, – a ceremony the Japanese always observe upon joyful occasions. His wife Agnes, falling upon her knees, besought her husband to cut off her hair, as a sign that she never would marry again. After a little hesitation, he complied with this request; prophesying, however, that she and his mother would soon follow him to heaven; and then, accompanied by the three Giffiaques, or officers of the Confraternity of Mercy, whom he had summoned to be present at the execution, they all entered the hall where it was intended to take place. Michael, one of the Giffiaques, carried a crucifix; the other two bore lighted torches; and Simon walked between his wife and mother, while his disconsolate servants brought up the rear.

Simon and his friends recited the litany; and then, bowing before a picture of our Saviour, until his forehead touched the ground, the nobleman, who acted as executioner, took off his head at a single blow. Foreseeing that her own death would speedily follow upon his, Agnes and her mother continued in prayer, the three Giffiaques remaining in attendance, in order to be able to assist at their execution; and, in fact, twenty-four hours had not elapsed before it was told them they were to die on the cross; the officer who came to acquaint them with their sentence bringing with him Magdalen, the wife of John, and Luis, a little child whom the latter had adopted as his own, both of whom were condemned to a similar fate.

With eager joy the prisoners embraced each other, praising, and thanking God, not only that they were to suffer for Jesus, but also that they were to suffer on a cross like Jesus; and then, robed in their best attire, they set off for the place of execution in palanquins which the guards had provided for the purpose. The Giffiaques walked at their side. Jane, the mother of Simon, besought the executioner to bind her limbs as tightly as possible, that she might thus share the anguish which the nails inflicted upon those of Jesus; and she spoke from her cross with so much force and eloquence, that the presiding officer, fearing the effects of her words upon the people, had her stabbed, without waiting for the rest of the victims. Luis and Magdalen were tied up next. They bound the child so violently that he could not refrain from shrieking; but when they asked him if he was afraid to die, he said he was not; and so they took and set him up directly opposite his mother. For a brief interval the martyr and her adopted child gazed silently on each other; then, summoning all her strength, she said, "Son, we are going to heaven: take courage, and cry, 'Jesus, Mary!' with your latest breath." And again the child replied, as he had done before when, on leaving their own home, she had made him a similar exhortation, "Mother, you shall be obeyed!" The executioner struck at him first, but missed his aim; and more than ever fearing for his constancy, Magdalen exhorted him from her cross, while Michael, standing at its foot, spoke words of comfort to him. But the child needed not their urging; he did not shriek again, nor did he shrink, but waited patiently until a second blow had pierced him through and through; and the lance, yet reeking with his blood, was directly afterwards plunged into the heart of his mother, whose sharpest pang had probably already passed on the instant when the son of her love expired before her. And now the fair and youthful Agnes alone remained, kneeling, as when she first had reached the place of execution; for no one yet had the courage to approach her. Like the headsman of her namesake, the loveliest child of Christian story, her executioners could only weep that they were bid to mar the beauty of any thing so fair; their hands were powerless to do their office; and finding at last that no one sought to bind her, she went herself and laid her gently and modestly down upon her cross. There she lay, waiting for her hour, calm and serene as if pillowed on an angel's bosom, until at length some of the spectators, induced partly by a bribe offered by the executioner, but chiefly by a bigoted hatred of her religion, bound her, and lifted up her cross, and then struck her blow after blow, until beneath their rude and unaccustomed hands she painfully expired. For a year and a day the bodies were left to hang upon their crosses, as a terror to all others of the same religion; but Christians were not wanting to watch the blackening corpses, and, with a love like that of Rizpah, the mother of the sons of Saul, to drive from thence the fowls of the air by day, and the beasts of the field by night; and finally, when the period of prohibition was expired, reverently to gather the hallowed bones to their last resting-place in the church of Nangasaki.

The Giffiaques were the next who felt the tyrant's rage. The governor himself urged on their punishment, for the loss of his friends had made him furious; and, attributing it entirely to the fact of their religion, he resolved to wreak his vengeance upon all others who professed it. "What shall I do with these men?" he cried, in a kind of savage perplexity, upon being told that the Giffiaques had rather courted than evaded their imprisonment: "Death they rejoice in, as in the acquisition of an empire, and they go to exile as a slave to freedom. The cross is a royal throne, which they mount with pleasure and occupy with pride. I will therefore contrive for them a fate which shall make death, under any form whatever, a boon to be desired, but not to be attained." Within the city walls there was a prison which the king had constructed for the reception of his debtors. Open on every side, its inmates were exposed both to the curious gaze of the passing crowds, and to the suffering of alternate heat and cold, as summer or winter revolved over their heads. There, huddled together in this enclosure, the prisoners lay, not upon mats, nor yet upon the damp cold earth, which in comparison would have been a mercy, but upon heaps of horrible filth, the accumulation of many years; for by a hideous cruelty of invention, the monster would never permit the cleansing out of these loathsome places, hoping by the disgusting condition of their dungeon to extort a speedier payment from his victims. Into this den of suffering the governor cast the three Christians whom he had selected for his prey, never doubting that they would be soon subdued by the anguish of a life more terrible than the most lingering and painful death; and so for years the Giffiaques lingered on, breathing this infected air – pillowed, sleeping and waking, on the loathsome dung which matted all the pavement, feeding upon such dry crusts and filthy water as their jailors chose to give them; until at length one among them died, and then the tyrant, weary of such willing victims, commanded the other two to be cut in pieces.

According to the usual custom of Japan, their children were condemned to suffer with them; and however hateful such a practice must appear to the natural heart of man, yet was it ever to the martyrs a most welcome boon; for theirs was a Christian as well as a parental love, teaching them to set the spiritual above the temporal welfare of their children, and therefore rather to rejoice in, than simply to meet with calm submission, that double condemnation which, by uniting the fate of their little ones with their own, snatched them from any future chance of perversion, and put them at once in possession of their heavenly kingdom.

One of these little victims was sleeping when they came to fetch him: he was only six years old, and so tiny, that he had to run as fast as he could in order to keep up with the soldier who conducted him to execution; yet, so far from being frightened at his fate, he even gazed without dismay on the disfigured corpses of his father, uncle, and cousin, who had all suffered ere he reached the spot; and then, kneeling down and joining his hands together, looked up smiling in the face of him who was to lay him at their side. That look disarmed his executioner. The man suddenly sheathed his sword, declaring that he had not the heart to perform his office; and when two others sought to do it for him, they also burst into tears, as that innocent smiling face met their downward gaze; nor was the deed accomplished until a common slave, compelled by force to the odious duty, literally hacked and hewed the poor infant to pieces.

While these scenes, and scenes like these, were constantly recurring at Fingo, the kingdom of Firando was likewise giving its quota of martyr-triumphs to the Church; Damian, a blind man of Amangucchi, being almost the first to lay down his life for the faith. From the time when the Jesuit fathers were forcibly driven out of that city, the entire management of the infant mission had devolved upon this poor old man, whose life was henceforth passed in preaching, catechizing and baptizing, visiting the sick, and burying the dead, and doing as much of the work of a zealous missionary as could be accomplished by any one lacking holy orders. This was sufficient for the tyrant, and Damian received his choice between Christianity and death on the one hand, and on the other apostasy and life, with all that could make life most desirable to the heart of man.

The brave old Christian was not long in making his choice; and he died for a testimony to the faith, as he had lived for its propagation, his body being cut to pieces, in order to prevent the other Christians from collecting his relics for more honourable interment.

His death was the signal for innumerable other massacres in this and other kingdoms of Japan; but nowhere was the heathen enmity more unrelentingly displayed than in the once flourishing and Christian kingdom of Arima. The king of that country, Michael, was mean, heartless, and ambitious, and exerted his authority and power every day in committing fresh acts of cruelty against the Christians of Arima. Under the guidance of his chief minister Safiori, he had already pulled down the churches, overthrown the crosses, sent hundreds of the principal Christians into exile, and banished the Jesuit fathers, to whose influence he attributed their constancy in the struggle; and having thus, as he hoped, destroyed every landmark to which they could confidently look for guidance, he published an edict commanding them all to embrace idolatry or die. At the first mutterings of the coming storm, the Christians, by general consent, had enrolled themselves in a confraternity, styled especially "of martyrs," because, beside the usual practices of prayer, fasting, and penance, common to all similar associations, the members pledged themselves to suffer loss of property, banishment, or martyrdom itself, faithfully and joyfully, for the name of Jesus. This confraternity afterwards extended itself over other parts of Japan; and it was even adopted by the little children, who were destined to play nearly as prominent a part in the coming persecutions as their parents themselves, and to whom it was therefore given by the Jesuit fathers, with rules and practices adapted to their tender years. Thus prepared and strengthened for the struggle, the Christians waited in patient courage its commencement; and they had not long to wait.

Michael sent first for a nobleman of the name of Thomas, renowned for his prowess both by sea and by land, and with every art of persuasion in his power, sought to induce him to yield obedience to his orders. The blunt soldier listened impatiently to the miserable sophisms of his chieftain, and then flatly told him, that as a soldier would be deserving of death for deserting his colours, so he should consider himself the most despicable of human beings, if for fear or favour of earthly monarch he could desert that King of kings to whom on the day of his baptism he had sworn allegiance; ending (so great was his indignation that he could not contain himself) with a rough speech, to the effect that he hated traitors as he hated treason, and would prefer death itself to the baseness of committing the one, or of being associated with the other. Such a speech to such a man the Christian well knew could only be uttered at the hazard of his head; no sooner, therefore, had he left the royal presence, than he sent for one of the Jesuit fathers, then lying hid in the city, and prepared himself for death. When urged by his friends, for his own sake, and for the sake of his family, who would otherwise be involved in his ruin, to seek safety by flight, he answered with characteristic spirit, "that so far from fleeing martyrdom, he would go to the end of the earth to seek it; and that he loved his children all too well to think of depriving them of a blessing which he coveted for himself above the empire of the world."

The next day the governor of the city invited him to dinner (so strangely do they manage these affairs in Japan); and Thomas, well aware of his approaching fate, took an affectionate farewell of his wife and children before accepting the ominous invitation. While he sat at table, his host presented him with a sword, asking his opinion as to its capabilities for the decapitation of a human head. Thomas, looking at it carelessly, pronounced it well made, and fitted for such a work; whereupon the governor receiving it out of his hands, stabbed him dead on the spot. A few hours afterwards his brother, quite as uncompromising a Christian as himself, suffered a similar fate; his mother Martha and his two young sons were also condemned; while his wife and daughter were, by a caprice of mercy, or perhaps of cruelty, exempted from the sentence. Very different from the ordinary effects of such opposite judgments were the feelings elicited by them on the present occasion: those who were to die blessed God, in an ecstasy of pious joy, that He had called them to suffer for the faith; while she who was to live – a widow, and now all but childless – gave way to an agony of grief at the double loss she was destined to endure. While she wept over her cruel lot, Martha called her grandchildren, and embracing them tenderly, told them, that as their father had died for Jesus Christ, so she and they were now to do the same, and then to go and live with him in heaven. The children quietly answered, "that there was nothing which they wished for better;" asking, at the same time, "when it was to be." "Just now," she said; "so go and take leave of your mother, and prepare yourselves for death." With smiling countenances, the children hastened to obey; and having distributed their toys among their playfellows, and made some parting presents to their nurses, they clothed themselves in the white robes which Martha had taken care to provide for the occasion, and knelt before their mother, saying "Adieu, dear mother; we are going to be martyred." She was weeping at the instant as if her very heart would break; but fearing to discourage her children, or cast the shadow of her own maternal grief over their coming hour of trial, she embraced them, saying, "Go, dear children; and remembering Him who died for you, tread courageously in the footsteps of your father and your uncle. Behold them stretching out their arms to help you; behold the saints and angels with crowns prepared to set upon your heads; behold Jesus Christ Himself inviting you to His most sweet embraces; and when you reach the place of execution, show yourselves to be indeed His followers by your contempt of death. Fall on your knees, loosen your collars, join your hands, bow down your heads, and cry out Jesus! Mary! with your latest breath. Oh, how wretched am I that I cannot be with you in that hour!" Then, hiding her face in the arms of her little ones, the poor mother burst into an uncontrollable fit of weeping, moving the very soldiers to such compassion, that, fearful of yielding to their feelings, they tore the children from her embraces, and almost threw them into the palanquin which was to convey them and their grandmother to the place of execution. During the short transit thither, that venerable Christian took care to occupy the little victims in prayer and pious ejaculations; nor did she cease her guardian-care when they reached the fatal spot; for she stood and saw them one by one butchered before her eyes, and then, advancing with a grave and stately pace, she in her turn submitted to the sword.

After this execution, eight of the principal citizens of Arima were summoned to the presence of their king, and there commanded to abjure the faith; while he, persecuting tyrant as he was, had the face to tell them that he only required an external submission, since he too was in heart a Christian like themselves, though compelled for the present by the emperor's orders to conceal his faith. Five out of the eight agreed to this infamous proposal; but four of them afterwards sincerely repented. The others were not to be cajoled out of their convictions, and were consequently condemned with their families to the penalty of fire. As soon as their sentence was made known at Nangasaki, one of the Fathers came privately to Arima to give spiritual succour to the captives, and thousands of Christians also flocked from every part of the country to witness their execution.

Never before perhaps had the Church presented such a spectacle to the world; and possibly never will she offer such another again. For three whole days that vast multitude remained camped in the open fields, patiently waiting for the execution of their brethren; but their presence struck terror into the heart of the craven king; and dreading lest they should either rescue the prisoners or seize upon the town, he faltered in his purpose. It never occurred to him that they of whom he feared such things would as soon have thought of robbing him of his material crown as of depriving the martyrs of their palm; they had, in fact, been careful to come without even their ordinary weapons of defence, in order to avoid the possibility of a doubt as to their peaceable intentions; and no sooner did they suspect the cause of the delay, than some of the gravest of their number waited on the governor to explain that they were merely there to witness the ceremony, and to promise that there should be neither tumult nor resistance if they were permitted to remain. Thus encouraged and reassured, preparations for the martyrdom went on apace. A wide plain just beneath the castle of the town was chosen for the purpose; the prisoners were confessed and communicated by a Jesuit father; and on the day appointed they came forth, dressed in their robes of ceremony, and with their hands tied behind their backs, accompanied by upwards of 40,00 °Christians, bearing lights in their hands and garlands on their heads, and singing the Litanies of our blessed Lady as they went along. Among the victims was a boy not more than eleven years old, and a young girl called Magdalen, who having already made a vow of virginity, had always led a life holy and pure as that of the martyr-virgins of old.