The story of nineteenth century Reformed Christianity in Japan does not begin with Perry, or with Harris, or with the arrival of Christian missionaries in 1859; for it has a subterranean and interior history, as we have hinted; while that of the Roman form and order is a story of unbroken continuity, though the life of the tunnel is now that of the sunny road. The parable of the leaven is first illustrated and then that of the mustard-seed. Before Christianity was phenomenal, it was potent. Let us now look from the interior to the outside.
On Perry's flag-ship, the Mississippi, the Bible lay open, a sermon was preached, and the hymn "Before Jehovah's Awful Throne" was sung, waking the echoes of the Japan hills. The Christian day of rest was honored on this American squadron. In the treaty signed in 1854, though it was made, indeed, with use of the name of God and terms of Christian chronology, there was nothing upon which to base, either by right or privilege, the residence of missionaries in the country. Townsend Harris, the American Consul-General, who hoisted his flag and began his hermit life at Shimoda, in September, 1855, had as his only companion a Dutch secretary, Mr. Heusken, who was later, in Yedo, to be assassinated by ronins.
Without ship or soldier, overcoming craft and guile, and winning his way by simple honesty and perseverance, Mr. Harris obtained audience[23] of "the Tycoon" in Yedo, and later from the Shōgun's daring minister Ii, the signature to a treaty which guaranteed to Americans the rights of residence, trade and commerce. Thus Americans were enabled to land as citizens, and pursue their avocation as religious teachers. As the government of the United States of America knows nothing of the religion of American citizens abroad, it protects all missionaries who are law-abiding citizens, without regard to creed.[24]
Japan Once More Missionary Soil.
The first missionaries were on the ground as soon as the ports were open. Though surrounded by spies and always in danger of assassination and incendiarism, they began their work of mastering the language. To do this without trained teachers or apparatus of dictionary and grammar, was then an appalling task. The medical missionary began healing the swarms of human sufferers, syphilitic, consumptive, and those scourged by small-pox, cholera and hereditary and acute diseases of all sorts. The patience, kindness and persistency of these Christian men literally turned the edge of the sword, disarmed the assassin, made the spies' occupation useless, shamed away the suspicious, and conquered the nearly invincible prejudices of the government. Despite the awful under-tow in the immorality of the sailor, the adventurer and the gain-greedy foreigner, the tide of Christianity began steadily to rise. Notwithstanding the outbursts of the flames of persecution, the torture and imprisonment of Christian captives and exiles, and the slow worrying to death of the missionary's native teachers, inquirers came and converts were made. In 1868, after revolution and restoration, the old order changed, and duarchy and feudalism passed away. Quick to seize the opportunity, Dr. J.C. Hepburn, healer of bodies and souls of men, presented a Bible to the Emperor, and the gift was accepted.
No sooner had the new government been established in safety, and the name of Yedo, the city of the Baydoor, been changed into that of Tōkiō, the Eastern Capital, than an embassy[25] of seventy persons started on its course round the world. At its head were three cabinet ministers of the new government and the court noble, Iwakura, of immemorial lineage, in whose veins ran the blood of the men called gods. Across the Pacific to the United States they went, having their initial audience of the President of the Republic that knows no state church, and whose Christianity had compelled both the return of the shipwrecked Japanese and the freedom of the slave.
This embassy had been suggested and its course planned by a Christian missionary, who found that of the seventy persons, one-half had been his pupils.[26]
The Imperial Embassy Round the World.
The purpose of these envoys was, first of all, to ask of the nations of Christendom equal rights, to get removed the odious extra-territoriality clause in the treaties, to have the right to govern aliens on their soil, and to regulate their own tariff. Secondarily, its members went to study the secrets of power and the resources of civilization in the West, to initiate the liberal education of their women by leaving in American schools a little company of maidens, to enlarge the system of education for their own country, and to send abroad with approval others of their young men who, for a decade past had, in spite of every ban and obstacle, been furtively leaving the country for study beyond the seas.