They found, further yet, free
churches divorced from politics and independent of the state; that the
leading force of the world was Christianity, that persecution was
barbarous, and that toleration was the law of the future, and largely
the condition of the present. It took but a few whispers over the
telegraphic wire, and the anti-Christian edicts disappeared from public
view like snowflakes melting on the river. The right arm of persecution
was broken.
The story of the Book of Acts of the modern apostles in Japan is told,
first in the teaching of inquirers, preaching to handfuls, the gathering
of tiny companies, the translation of the Gospel, and then prayer and
waiting for the descent of the Holy Spirit. A study of the Book of the
Acts of the Apostles, followed in order to find out how the Christian
Church began. On the 10th day of March, in the year of our Lord and of
the era of Meiji (Enlightened Peace) the fifth, 1872, at Yokohama, in
the little stone chapel built on part of Commodore Perry's treaty
ground, was formed the first Reformed or Protestant Christian Church in
Japan.
At this point our task is ended. We cannot even glance at the native
Christian churches of the Roman, Reformed, or Greek order, or attempt to
appraise the work of the foreign missionaries.
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