servants and other men and women.  Others they beheaded, among whom the lot fell to a woman with three children, two of whom were two years old and the other older.  On the sixth of September of the same year, they arrested and burned alive a Japanese father of Ours, together with two chiefs, his servants.  The governor and president of that city was present at all these murders.  He, in conformity with his orders, tried to make all the Christian inhabitants recant, without respect to age or estate, and to persuade them all to adopt some one of the Japanese sects, making use of many ingenious artifices for this purpose.  Seeing that he could not effect his purpose, he tried locking some of them in their houses, nailing up the doors, and depriving them of all communication with relatives and friends, to which end he set guards around them.  Some weak-spirited persons obeyed him; but the greater number, both chiefs and common people, resisted him.  The governor, seeing that so many resisted, as he had no orders to take their lives, but only to send them as prisoners to the court, sent those whom he thought best, and among them fifteen of the most prominent persons.  Fearing because some of these were persons of rank, and had many relatives, and some of them were actually officials in the same city, in order to prevent any revolt from arising he asked the neighboring tonos for a large number of soldiers.  A great many of these came, who were lodged throughout the city; but, seeing that there was no resistance he ordered them back to their fortresses, and, the confessors being much rejoiced, he sent them prisoners to the court.  Others are kept in captivity until the arrival of a decree from the court.  Four distinguished families were exiled to Macan, with four hundred and thirty of the common people, who were driven to the neighboring mountains as a warning and intimidation to many others, and all intercourse and communication with them was cut off.  It was ordered that no one should admit them to their houses.  They were commanded not to build huts, even for the infant children, to defend them from the inclemencies of the weather.  Guards were set over them so that no one should grant them even a mat for their shelter, the persecutors hoping by this means to bend them to their will.  Although the confessors of Christ undergo great suffering, they do so with joy and invincible constancy.  Others who were not banished were deprived of their employment, to force them to abandon their resistance.  Many fled for this reason, leaving the most populous city in Japan almost depopulated, although it still contains confessors who ennoble it. [67]