expressed that sovereign divinity, of which he desired to give them a distinct notion; the second, because he feared lest those idolaters might confound that first Being with their Camis, and their Potoques, in case he should call it by those names which were common to their idols.  From thence he took occasion to tell them, “That as they never had any knowledge of the true God, so they never were able to express his name; that the Portuguese, who knew him, called him Deos:”  and he repeated that word with so much action, and such a tone of voice, that he made even the Pagans sensible what veneration was due to that sacred name.  Having publicly condemned, in two several towns, the false sects of Japan, and the enormous vices reigning there, he was drawn by the inhabitants without the walls, where they had resolved to stone him.  But when they were beginning to take up the stones, they were overtaken by a violent and sudden storm, which constrained them all to betake themselves to flight:  The holy man continued in the midst of this rack of heaven, with flashes of lightning darting round about him, without losing his habitual tranquillity, but adoring that Divine Providence which fought so visibly in his favour.

He arrived at length at Meaco with his three companions in February 1551.  The name of that celebrated town, so widely spread for being the seat of empire and religion, where the Cubosama, the Dairy, and the Saso kept their court, seemed to promise great matters to Father Xavier; but the effect did not answer the appearances:  Meaco, which in the Japonian tongue signifies a thing worth seeing, was no more than the shadow of what formerly it had been, so terribly wars and fires had laid it waste.  On every side ruins were to be beheld, and the present condition of affairs threatened it with a total destruction.  All the neighbouring princes were combined together against the Cubosama, and nothing was to be heard but the noise of arms.

The man of God endeavoured to have gained an audience from the Cubosama, and the Dairy, but he could not compass it:  He could not so much as get admittance to the Saso, or high-priest of the Japonian religion.  To procure him those audiences, they demanded no less than an hundred thousand caixes, which amount to six hundred French crowns, and the Father had it not to give.  Despairing of doing any good on that side, he preached in the public places by that authority alone which the Almighty gives his missioners.  As the town was all in confusion, and the thoughts of every man taken up with the reports of war, none listened to him; or those who casually heard him in passing by, made no reflections on what he said.

Thus, after a fortnight’s stay at Meaco to no purpose, seeing no appearance of making converts amidst the disturbance of that place, he had a strong impulse of returning to Amanguchi, without giving for lost all the pains he had taken at Meaco; not only because of his great sufferings, (and sufferings are the gains of God’s apostles) but also because at least he had preached Christ Jesus in that place, that is to say, in the most idolatrous town of all the universe, and opened the passage for his brethren, whom God had fore-appointed in the years following, there to establish Christianity, according to the revelations which had been given him concerning it.