patience:  He was the most learned amongst all the doctors of Amanguchi, and the most violent against the gospel He considered, that a law which taught such patience, and such insensibility of affronts, could only come from heaven; and argued thus within himself:  “These preachers, who with so much constancy endure the vilest of all injuries, cannot pretend to cozen us.  It would cost them too dear a price; and no man will deceive another at his own expence.  He only, who made the heart of man, can place it in so great tranquillity.  The force of nature cannot reach so far; and this Christian patience must proceed alone from some divine principle.  These people cannot but have some infallible assurance of the doctrine they believe, and of the recompence which they expect; for, in line, they are ready to suffer all things for their God, and have no human expectations.  After all, what inconvenience or danger can it be to embrace their law?  If what they tell us of eternity be true, I shall be eternally miserable in not believing it; and supposing there be no other life but this, is it not better to follow a religion which elevates a man above himself, and which gives him an unalterable peace, than to profess our sects, which continue us in all our weakness, and which want power to appease the disorders of our hearts?” He made his inward reflections on all these things, as he afterwards declared; and these considerations being accompanied with the motions of grace, touched him so to the quick, that, as soon as the sermon was ended, he confessed that the virtue of the preacher had convinced him; he desired baptism, and received it with great solemnity.

This illustrious conversion was followed with answerable success.  Many who had a glimmering of the truth, and feared to know it yet more plainly, now opened their eyes, and admitted the gospel light; amongst the rest, a young man of five-and-twenty years of age, much esteemed for the subtlety of his understanding, and educated in the most famous universities of Japan.  He was come to Amanguchi, on purpose to be made a Bonza; but being informed that the sect of Bonzas, of which he desired to be a member, did not acknowledge a first Principle, and that their books had made no mention of him, he changed his thoughts, and was unresolved on what course of living he should fix; until being finally convinced, by the example of the doctor, and the arguments of Xavier, he became a Christian.  The name of Laurence was given him; and it was he, who, being received by Xavier himself into the Society of Jesus, exercised immediately the ministry of preaching with so much fame, and so great success, that he converted an innumerable multitude of noble and valiant men, who were afterwards the pillars of the Japonian church.

As to what remains, the monasteries of the Bonzas were daily thinned, and grew insensibly to be dispeopled by the desertion of young men, who had some remainders of modesty and morality.  Being ashamed of leading a brutal life, and of deceiving the simple, they laid by their habits of Bonzas, together with the profession, that, coming back into the world, they might more easily be converted.  These young Bonzas discovered to Xavier the mysteries of their sects, and revealed to him their hidden abominations, which were covered with an outside of austerity.