Besides these men with religious motives, the ships of the West came with offers of trade and threats of invasion.  These were English, French, Russian and American, and the story of the frequent episodes has been told by Hildreth, Aston,[9] Nitobe, and others.  There is also a considerable body of native literature which gives the inside view of these efforts to force the seclusion of the hermit nation, and coax or compel the Japanese to be more sociable and more human.  All were in vain until the peaceful armada, under the flag of thirty-one stars, led by Matthew Calbraith Perry,[10] broke the long seclusion of this Thorn-rose of the Pacific, and the unarmed diplomacy of Townsend Harris,[11] brought Japan into the brotherhood of commercial and Christian nations.

Within the isolating walls and the barred gates the story of the seekers after God is a thrilling one.  The intellect of choice spirits, beating like caged eagles the bars of their prisons, yearned for more light and life.  “Though an eagle be starving,” says the Japanese proverb, “it will not eat grain;” and so, while the mass of the people and even the erudite, were content with ground food—­even the chopped straw and husks of materialistic Confucianism and decayed Buddhism—­there were noble souls who soared upward to exercise their God-given powers, and to seek nourishment fitted for that human spirit which goeth upward and not downward, and which, ever in restless discontent, seeks the Infinite.

Protests of Inquiring Spirits.

There is no stronger proof of the true humanity and the innate god-likeness of the Japanese, of their worthiness to hold and their inherent power to win a high place among the nations of the earth, than this longing of a few elect ones for the best that earth could give and Heaven bestow.  We find men in travail of spirit, groping after God if haply they might find Him, following the ways of the Spirit along lines different, and in pathways remote, from those laid down by Confucius and his materialistic commentators, or by Buddha and his parodists or caricaturists.  The story of the philosophers, who mutinied against the iron clamps and governmentally nourished system of the Seido College expounders, is yet to be fully told.[12] It behooves some Japanese scholar to tell it.

How earnest truth-seeking Japanese protested and rebelled against the economic fallacies, against the political despotism, against the abominable usurpations, against the false strategies and against the inherent immoralities of the Tokugawa system, has of late years been set forth with tantalizing suggestiveness, but only in fragments, by the native historians.  Heartrending is the narrative of these men who studied, who taught, who examined, who sifted the mountains of chaff in the native literature and writings, who made long journeys on foot all over the country, who furtively travelled in Korea and China, who boarded Dutch and Russian vessels, who secretly read forbidden books, who tried