This martyrdom, which was distinguished among the Japanese as the "Great Martyrdom," on account both of the rank and number of its victims, had been preceded by another at Miako, which took place under circumstances of peculiar barbarity. One of the victims was in daily expectation of giving birth to a child; nevertheless she was included in the sentence which sent her husband, a nobleman of the highest rank, and their six young children, with upwards of forty other Christians, to the stake.
The tragical situation in which she was placed had however, no terrors for this heroic woman. She employed her prison-hours in preparing robes for herself and her children to wear at their execution; and when she was brought to the destined place, calmly, and without assistance, she stepped from the cart, and throwing a rich mantle over her shoulders, prepared to suffer with a modesty and composure that won her the admiration of all beholders. It was dark night before fire was set to their several piles; but as soon as the smoke had cleared away, the martyrs were seen by the light of the bright flames amid which they stood, with eyes fixed on heaven and their forms motionless and erect, as though they had been figures chiselled out of stone.
In very horror the spectators were silent, and the stillness and hush of death was upon the midnight air, when suddenly from out of that fiery furnace a flood of melody was poured,—men and women and children singing the praises of the living God as sweetly, and with notes as true as though the red and thirsty flames had been but the dews of heaven upon their brows. The sighs and prayers of the assistants, which could no longer be repressed, the shouts and execrations of the soldiers and executioners, soon mingled with this death-song; and these and the dark night, and the fierce fire that illuminated its gloom, now flashing intolerable light upon the victims, now glancing lividly on the pale faces and shrinking forms of the densely-packed spectators, altogether formed an union of sights and sounds that alternately swayed the feelings to terror and compassion. But the music of that marvellous choir died gradually away; the sudden failing of each gladsome voice, the silent sinking of each upright form, telling that another, and yet another had yielded to their doom, was marked by the watchers with redoubled lamentations; though their tenderest sympathies were still reserved for the mother dying in the midst of her little ones.
From the cross to which they had bound her, Thecla (for such was her name) still kept her eyes fixed upon her children, animating them by gentle smiles and words of comfort to suffer well; while the youngest, an infant only three years old, she held with superhuman courage in her arms during the whole of the terrible scene that followed. Her own anguish had no power to extort a single sigh from her lips; but those who watched her wept to see the useless efforts which she made to diminish the sufferings of her babe. She caressed it, soothed it, hushed its cries, wiped away its tears, sought with her own hands to shelter its tender face from the terrible contact of the fire, and died at last with the little victim so closely folded to her bosom, that it was afterwards found almost impossible to separate the bodies of the mother and the child.
These martyrdoms are only specimens of those which during this period continually took place in Japan. Some Christians were crucified, others burnt, others beheaded; numbers again branded upon the cheeks and forehead with the sign of the cross, their fingers and toes cut off, and their eyes forced out; and thus maimed and helpless, they were sent back to their families, who (to their honour be it written) never failed to receive them with all the more pride and affection, the more deeply and hideously they had been disfigured for the sake of Jesus.
The great majority of the martyrdoms hitherto recorded had been accomplished by fire; but now a different mode of torture was to be pressed into the service. Water was called into requisition; and Father James Caravail, with several lay Christians, was the leader of many heroic confessors who perished from cold. They were left in the first instance, for three hours in freezing water, during which time one of them died; the rest on being carried back to prison and threatened with the martyrdom of fire in case of perseverance, cried out with one voice; "Oh, happy we, to pass through fire and water to the place of our repose!" Instead of the stake, however, the next day they were again placed up to their necks in water; while, the better to attempt them to apostasy, tents, warm baths, and comfortable clothing, were made ready on the banks of the pool, and as near as possible to the spot where their sentence was to be carried into execution. As the day advanced, the water froze more and more; and heavy drifts of snow beating continually upon them, added greatly to their agony. Scarcely able to endure it any longer, one among them sobbed heavily for breath; but Father Paul hearing it, cried out, "Have patience, son, for yet a little while; and these torments will be changed into everlasting repose." At the sound of the father's voice, and his cheering words, the poor victim regained his courage, and soon afterwards happily expired, at the very moment when another reduced to a similar extremity, exclaimed, "Father, my course is nearly finished." "Depart then," replied the latter; "depart in peace to God, and die in his holy grace." Thus one by one they perished in this icy grave; and at length the father, who through the live-long day had cheered his fellow-martyrs to the combat, was left to suffer and to die alone. Night had already closed in heavy and chill around him; and with the exception of his guards and some few faithful Christians, none were there to watch him, for the spectators had all retired to their comfortable homes, and it was not until just midnight, that after fifteen hours of stern endurance, he bowed himself down to the frozen wave, and placidly expired. This martyrdom took place in the year 1624, and shortly afterwards four more religious were burnt at Faco; in June of the same year the provincial of the Jesuits, with eight of the Society, perished in a similar manner; and in the following month Lewis Xanch, a Dominican, was put to death at Omura.
We have mentioned these executions of priests without alluding to the almost weekly massacres which took place among the lay converts, merely to show the virulence and success with which the missionaries were now every where pursued; and when it is remembered that at the commencement of the persecution there were, besides the Jesuits, but a few secular priests and about thirty religious of other orders, in Japan, and that no reinforcement had succeeded in reaching them from without, words will not be needed to point out the deadly nature of the blow which the Xoguno was at last inflicting on the church. Having said thus much, however, upon the fate of the religious, it would be a crying injustice to the rest of the Christians to pass over their sufferings altogether in silence.
The Xoguno having once explicitly declared himself opposed to their religion, the inferior monarchs, as a matter of course, vied with each other in their efforts to uproot it. It was only on an express condition to that effect that Bugendono, the new governor of Nangasaki, had been installed in that office; and taunted continually by his rivals for courtly favour with his little success, he employed himself day and night in the invention of more ingenious barbarities to effect his purpose. The object being rather to produce apostasy than death, every species of torture was made as slow as possible in its execution, and was generally eked out with intervals of rest and refreshment—a thousand times more dangerous to the perseverance of the victim than the sharpest continued agony. Some were placed in deep pits, and there nearly buried alive; while executioners appointed for the purpose, slowly, and with blunt weapons, sawed off sometimes the arms and sometimes the head, salt being thrown on the bleeding wound to sharpen its anguish; physicians were also at hand, whose business it was to prolong the life of the sufferer for as many days as possible, by carefully ascertaining the amount of his physical strength, and administering cordials when it was beginning to fail. Others were hung with their head downwards in a pit, where, with the necessary precaution of occasional bleeding, they were made to exist for a considerable time in all the sufferings of an apoplexy; while others again, by means of a funnel forced far down into their throats, were compelled to swallow enormous quantities of water, which was afterwards forced out of the body by violent pressure. Even the Dutch, themselves more than half the authors of these evils, speak with horror of the deeds which they witnessed at Firando. The nails of the victims were violently wrenched off, holes bored into their legs and arms, great morsels of flesh torn out of their persons by the insertion of hollow reeds which were turned round like a screw, burning brimstone and sulphur forced by long tubes up their noses; and they were, besides, frequently compelled to walk about with executioners holding lighted torches close to their persons. Nor were these cruelties inflicted singly, or upon solitary and more noted delinquents. By tens, by fifties, by hundreds at a time, they were assembled for their trial; one torture rapidly succeeding another, and each new one being so cunningly contrived, that the slightest word of complaint, the most trivial movement of resistance when pain had become almost intolerable, was to be considered as a signal of apostasy, and was greeted by cries of "He is fallen! he is fallen!"—the favourite and most significant words by which the heathen expressed at once the fact of a Christian's recantation, and their own opinion of the weakness through which he had succumbed.
Under circumstances such as these, it is not so wonderful that many failed, as that hundreds and thousands persevered to the end, winning their crown by a long-suffering and patience which, even in the primitive Church, were never surpassed. Men offered themselves willingly to every torture which Eastern ingenuity could devise, or reckless disregard of human life put into execution. Women looked calmly on while their infants perished, and then followed with gladness and joy in the same path to glory. At a city near Omura, a brave Christian plunged his hand into the burning coals, and never withdrew it until commanded to do so by the tyrant who had taunted and dared him to the deed; while at Firando fifty young Christians were made to kneel naked upon living embers, on the express understanding that the most involuntary expression of pain should be considered as apostasy; and having by their unflinching firmness baffled the closest scrutiny of those who watched them, were sent back to die, half roasted as they were, to their several homes. In one place eighteen infants were put to death in the presence of their parents; at another, a child only seven years old, suspected with the rest of his family of the concealment of a priest, lived for as many days in the midst of the torture they inflicted on him, without once flinching or failing in his heroic resolution. To each fresh invention of their cruelty he only answered, probably to avoid being betrayed into imprudent disclosures, "Jesus, Mary! Jesus, Mary! How I long to be in heaven with my God!" Nor could other words be extorted from his lips, even when, in their despair of succeeding, they cut open the little creature's shoulders, and poured boiling lead into the wound; and finally, he and his family were burnt alive, without a single one among them having been induced by weakness to give evidence against the priest.
Opposed to constancy such as this, every ordinary mode of torture must have seemed only useless and unmeaning; but at length another was hit upon, and one so barbarous in its nature, that no tyrant, however cruel or ferocious, who had hitherto ruled in Japan, had ever thought of inflicting it on the most guilty of his subjects.