Christianity, in the sixteenth century, came to Japan only in its papal or Roman Catholic form.  While in it was infused much of the power and spirit of Loyola and Xavier, yet the impartial critic must confess that this form was military, oppressive and political.[25] Nevertheless, though it was impure and saturated with the false principles, the vices and the embodied superstitions of corrupt southern Europe, yet, such as it was, Portuguese Christianity confronted the worst condition of affairs, morally, intellectually and materially, which Japan has known in historic times.  Defective as the critic must pronounce the system of religion imported from Europe, it was immeasurably superior to anything that the Japanese had hitherto known.

It must be said, also, that Portuguese Christianity in Japan tried to do something more than the mere obtaining of adherents or the nominal conversion of the people.[26] It attempted to purify and exalt their life, to make society better, to improve the relations between rulers and ruled; but it did not attempt to do what it ought to have done.  It ignored great duties and problems, while it imitated too fully, not only the example of the kings of this world in Europe but also of the rulers in Japan.  In the presence of soldier-like Buddhist priests, who had made war their calling, it would have been better if the Christian missionaries had avoided their bad example, and followed only in the footsteps of the Prince of Peace; but they did not.  On the contrary, they brought with them the spirit of the Inquisition then in full blast in Spain and Portugal, and the machinery with which they had been familiar for the reclamation of native and Dutch “heretics.”  Xavier, while at Goa, had even invoked the secular arm to set up the Inquisition in India, and doubtless he and his followers would have put up this infernal enginery in Japan if they could have done so.  They had stamped and crushed out “heresy” in their own country, by a system of hellish tortures which in its horrible details is almost indescribable.  The rusty relics now in the museums of Europe, but once used in church discipline, can be fully appreciated only by a physician or an anatomist.  In Japan, with the spirit of Alva and Philip II., these believers in the righteousness of the Inquisition attacked violently the character of native bonzes, and incited their converts to insult the gods, destroy the Buddhist images, and burn or desecrate the old shrines.  They persuaded the daimi[=o]s, when these lords had become Christians, to compel their subjects to embrace their religion on pain of exile or banishment.  Whole districts were ordered to become Christian.  The bonzes were exiled or killed, and fire and sword as well as preaching, were employed as means of conversion.  In ready imitation of the Buddhists, fictitious miracles were frequently got up to utilize the credulity of the superstitious in furthering the faith—­all of which is related not by hostile critics, but by admiring historians and by sympathizing eye-witnesses.[27]