The Father, who was at open defiance with those men, who were the mortal enemies of all the faithful, and whose only interest it was to hinder the establishment of the faith, published whatsoever was told him in relation to them, and represented them in their proper colours.  These unmasked hypocrites became the laughter of the people; but what mortified them more, was, that they, who heard them like oracles before this, now upbraided them openly with their ignorance.  A woman would sometimes challenge them to a disputation; and urge them with such home and pressing arguments, that the more they endeavoured to get loose, the more they were entangled:  For the Father, being made privy to the secrets of every sect, furnished the new proselytes with weapons to vanquish the Bonzas, by reducing them to manifest contradictions; which, among the Japonese, is the greatest infamy that can happen to a man of letters.  But the Bonzas got not off so cheap, as only to be made the derision of the people; together with their credit and their reputation they lost the comfortable alms, which was their whole subsistence:  So that the greater part of them, without finding in themselves the least inclinations to Christianity, bolted out of their convents, that they might not die of hunger in them; and changed their profession of Bonzas, to become either soldiers or tradesmen; which gave the Christians occasion to say, with joy unspeakable, “That, in a little time, there would remain no more idolaters in Amanguchi, of those religious cheats, than were barely sufficient to keep possession of their monasteries.”

The elder Bonzas, in the mean time, more hardened in their sect, and more obstinate than the young, spared for nothing to maintain their possession.  They threatened the people with the wrath of their gods, and denounced the total destruction of the town and kingdom; they said, “The God whom the Europeans believed, was not Deos, or Deus, as the Portuguese called him, but Dajus, that is to say, in the Japonian tongue, a lie, or forgery.”  They added, “That this God imposed on men a heavy yoke.  What justice was it to punish those who transgressed a law, which it was impossible to keep?  But where was Providence, if the law of Jesus was necessary to salvation, which suffered fifteen ages to slide away without declaring it to the most noble part of all the world?  Surely a religion, whose God was partial in the dispensation of his favours, could not possibly be true; and if the European doctrine had but a shadow of truth in it, China could never have been so long without the knowledge of it.”  These were the principal heads of their accusation, and Xavier reports them in his letters; but he gives not an account of what answers he returned, and they are not made known to us by any other hand.  Thus, without following two or three historians, who make him speak according to their own ideas on all these articles, I shall content myself with what the saint himself had left in writing.  The idolaters, instead of congratulating their own happiness, that they were enlightened by the beams of faith, bemoaned the blindness of their ancestors, and cried out in a lamentable tone, “What! are our forefathers burning in hellfire, because they did not adore a God who was unknown to them, and observed not a law which never was declared?” The Bouzas added fuel to their zeal, by telling them,