It was the Dutch, who, for two hundred years supplied the culture of Europe to Japan, introduced Western science, furnished almost the only intellectual stimulant, and were the sole teachers of medicine and science.[15] They trained up hundreds of Japanese to be physicians who practised rational medicine and surgery.  They filled with needed courage the hearts of men, who, secretly practising dissection of the bodies of criminals, demonstrated the falsity of Chinese ideas of anatomy.  It was Dutch science which exploded and drove out of Japan that Chinese system of medicine, by means of which so many millions have, during the long ages, been slowly tortured to death.

The Deshima Dutchman was a kindly adviser, helper, guide and friend, the one means of communication with the world, a handful of salt in the stagnant mass.  Long before the United States, or Commodore Perry, the Hollanders advised the Yodo government in favor of international intercourse.  The Dutch language, nearest in structure and vocabulary to the English, even richer in the descriptive energy of its terms, and saturated withal with Christian truth, was studied by eager young men.  These speakers of an impersonal language which in psychological development was scarcely above the grade of childhood, were exercised in a tongue that stands second to none in Europe for purity, vigor, personality and philosophical power.  The Japanese students of Dutch held a golden key which opened the treasures of modern thought and of the world’s literature.  The minds of thinking Japanese were thus made plastic for the reception of the ideas of Christianity.  Best of all, though forbidden by their contracts to import Bibles into Japan, the Dutchmen, by means of works of reference, pointed more than one inquiring spirit to the information by which the historic Christ became known.  The books which they imported, the information which they gave, the stimulus which they imparted, were as seeds planted within masonry-covered earth, that were to upheave and overthrow the fabric of exclusion and inclusion reared by the Tokugawa Sh[=o]guns.

Time and space fail us to tell how eager spirits not only groped after God, but sought the living Christ—­though often this meant to them imprisonment, suicide enforced by the law, or decapitation.  Yet over all Japan, long before the broad pennant of Perry was mirrored on the waters of Yedo Bay, there were here and there masses of leavened opinion, spots of kindled light, and fields upon which the tender green sprouts of new ideas could be detected.  To-day, as inquiry among the oldest of the Christian leaders and scores of volumes of modern biography shows, the most earnest and faithful among the preachers, teachers and soldiers in the Christian army, were led into their new world of ideas through Dutch culture.  The fact is revealed in repeated instances, that, through father, grandfather, uncle, or other relative—­some pilgrim to the Dutch at Nagasaki—­came their first