United States or Timor-Leste ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
In less than five years after the visit of Xavier to Kioto that city possessed seven Christian churches, while there were many others in the southwest section of the empire. In 1581, thirty years after Xavier's death, there were in Japan two hundred churches, while the number of converts is given at one hundred and fifty thousand.
The pupil of a Normal School gains there a start and an impulse, which carry him forward the rest of his life. A very little judicious experimental training redeems hundreds of candidates from utter and hopeless incompetency, and converts for them an awkward and painful drudgery into keen, hopeful and productive labor.
He was equally certain of the unyielding opposition of Duvall and Todd; the other three judges, Johnson, Livingston, and Story, were known to be adverse to the college, but were possible converts. The first point was to increase the sympathy of the Chief Justice to an eager and even passionate support. Mr. Webster knew the chord to strike, and he touched it with a master hand.
The earliest and most eloquent preachers, the most impassioned converts, the sublimest martyrs, had lived, preached, fought, suffered, and died with the precepts of Calvin in their hearts. The fire which had consumed the last vestige of royal and sacerdotal despotism throughout the independent republic, had been lighted by the hands of Calvinists.
Though the ranks of its once multitudinous congregations were now perceptibly thinned, though the new churches swarmed with converts, though the edicts from Rome denounced it as a blot on the face of the earth, its gloomy and solitary grandeur was still preserved. No unhallowed foot trod its secret recesses; no destroying hand was raised as yet against its ancient and glorious walls.
When we look for the results of these missions, we soon become aware that the influence of the French and the Jesuits extended far beyond the circle of converts. It eventually modified and softened the manners of many unconverted tribes. In the wars of the next century we do not often find those examples of diabolic atrocity with which the earlier annals are crowded.
"The schoolboy, when he sits down to make his rhymes, dares not say, even to his sister, that he hopes to rival Milton; but he nurses such a hope. The preacher, when he preaches his sermon, does not whisper, even to his wife, his belief that thousands may perhaps be turned to repentance by the strength of his words; but he thinks that the thousand converts are possible."
The missionary padres, backed by a little soldier help from the Spanish Government, were more able to control their Indian converts, and compel them to work so that a certain amount of prosperity was visible in the mission settlements, and some of them had even attained to a degree of wealth. This, however, was but an apparent civilisation; and its benefits only extended to the monks themselves.
It is an additional and striking instance too, of the retributive spirit with which it converts all the most cautious disguises of guilt, no matter how ingeniously assumed, into the very manifestations by which its enormity is discovered and punished."
Each mission had its priests, a few Spanish or Mexican soldiers, and scores, hundreds and sometimes thousands of Indian converts who received a scant support and some religious instruction.
Word Of The Day