Xavier having taken leave of the king, returned to the port of Figen, accompanied by the merchants, who were to set sail within few days after.  The departure of the saint was joyful to the Bonzas, but the glory of it was a great abatement to their pleasure.  It appeared to them, that all the honours he had received redounded to their shame; and that after such an affront, they should remain eternally blasted in the opinion of the people, if they did not wipe it out with some memorable vengeance.  Being met together, to consult on a business which so nearly touched them, they concluded, that their best expedient was to raise a rebellion in Fucheo, as they had done at Amanguchi, and flesh the people by giving up to them the ship of the Portuguese merchants, first to be plundered, then burned, and the proprietors themselves to be destroyed.  In consequence of this, if fortune favoured them, to attempt the person of the king, and having dispatched him, to conclude their work by extinguishing the royal line.  As Xavier was held in veneration in the town, even amongst the most dissolute idolaters, they were of opinion they did nothing, if they did not ruin his reputation, and make him odious to the people.  Thereupon, they set themselves at work to publish, not only what the Bonzas of Amanguchi had written of him, but what they themselves had newly invented; “That he was the most wicked of mankind; an enemy of the living and the dead; his practice being to dig up the carcases of the buried, for the use of his enchantments; and that he had a devil in his mouth, by whose assistance he charmed his audience.”  They added, “That he had spelled the king, and from thence proceeded these new vagaries in his understanding and all his inclinations; but that, in case he came not out of that fit of madness, it should cost him no less than his crown and life:  That Amida and Xaca, two powerful and formidable gods, had sworn to make an example of him and of his subjects; that therefore the people, if they were wise, should prevent betimes the wrath of those offended deities, by revenging their honour on that impostor of a Bonza, and these European pirates who made their idol of him.”  The people were too well persuaded of the holiness of Xavier, to give credence to such improbable stories as were raised of him; and all the Bonzas could say against him, served only to increase the public hatred against themselves.  Thus despairing of success amongst the multitude, they were forced to take another course, to destroy him in the good opinion of the king.

About twelve leagues distant from the town there was a famous monastery of the Bonzas, the superior of which was one Fucarandono, esteemed the greatest scholar and most accomplished in all the learning of Japan:  he had read lectures of the mysteries of their divinity for the space of thirty years, in the most renowned university of the kingdom.  But however skilled he was in all sciences, his authority was yet greater