Outside the ramparts, a savager duel engrossed the activities of principals, seconds, and spectators alike. The fife and drum fired men into heartier doings, but none measured so accurately as did Yodogima the final consequence: were she to fall short in her estimate?
These were momentous deeds, of far-reaching effect; all around them were civilizations and conditions bordering upon the speculative, but none stood seemingly as balanced as their own; China had ages ago waded through its materialism, and again lapped into spiritual inanimation; India had impoverished itself with elaborate dogmas; Judea had lost its nationality as a consequence of their religion; Greece and its philosophy had fallen before the onslaught of a doctored creed; Rome had exhausted herself in spreading that faith; the barbarous hosts of the Northland, had, as yet, scarcely doffed the breach clot, and only Spain, of these embryo nations, with her cruelties, impossible barbarities, loomed large upon the Western horizon.
All these things threshed out, searched for and understood, before the days of Yodogima, she believed that even they in their advanced position might profit by maintaining some sort of intercourse with the outside world; in fact, could not close their doors to other men, however low in the scale of humanism, so long as the God ideal held fast in the human heart.
You are a Buddhist, Harunaga? inquired the princess, after a pause.
Yes, your ladyship.
And knowledge is the foundation of that belief?
Yes, most honorable princess.
Then, why does Ieyasu refuse enlightment; Christianity, like all religions, is but a means to that end?
Because it is vicious, and the prince would be human, replied he, argumentatively.
Yodogima hesitated; she were treading upon sacred grounds to answer, and answer she would. The breath of a thousand, perhaps ten thousands, or more, years floated in from a realized haven to fan the flame of remembrance. This beauty land of theirs she knew, stretching far and away, to the very limits of an empire—carved and wrought of material perchance as crude and hopeful as any other now struggling as they once did—stimulated within her breast a desire to extend a helping hand: the cold dread of war, the cruel thirst for greed, the angry cry of, On with the battle, behind it all, underlying the activities out of which their culture had grown, froze hard the blood in her veins.