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 Séido 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 to improve their country and their people. These men saw that their country was falling behind not only the nations of the West, but, as it seemed to them, even the nations of the East. They felt that radical changes were necessary in order to reform the awful poverty, disease, licentiousness, national weakness, decay of bodily powers, and the creeping paralysis of the Samurai intellect and spirit. How they were ostracized, persecuted, put under ban, hounded by the spies, thrown into prison; how they died of starvation or of disease; how they were beheaded, crucified, or compelled to commit hara-kiri; how their books were purged by the censors, or put under ban or destroyed,[13] and their maps, writings and plates burned, has not yet been told. It is a story that, when fully narrated, will make a volume of extraordinary interest. It is a story which both Christian and human interests challenge some native author to tell. During all this time, but especially during the first half of the nineteenth century, there was one steady goal to which the aspiring student ever kept his faith, and to which his feet tended. There was one place of pilgrimage, toward which the sons of the morning moved, and which, despite the spy and the informer and the vigilance of governors, fed their spirits, and whence they carried the sacred fire, or bore the seed whose harvest we now see. That goal of the pilgrim band was Nagasaki, and the place where the light burned and the sacred flames were kindled was Déshima. The men who helped to make true patriots, daring thinkers, inquirers after truth, bringers in of a better time, yes, and even Christians and preachers of the good news of God, were these Dutchmen of Déshima.