they became the victims of one of the most ruthless and prolonged persecutions in the long, bloody story of confessional cruelty. From 1614-43, up to 5,000 Japanese Christians were judicially murdered, nearly always in public. The exact total is not known, but 3,125 individual cases are recorded, 71 of them Europeans. About 46 Jesuits and friars contrived to 'go underground’, but in the long run this merely served to prolong the agony, since the mission could not be effectively reinforced and fugitives were systematically and relentlessly hunted down. The most appalling tortures were inflicted on those, usually Japanese, who refused to recant. some died of starvation in gaol. Others were tortured to death. Europeans were sometimes beheaded. Most of the Japanese were burned alive, loosely tied by one arm to a stake in the middle of a circle of fire. some were mothers with small children in their arms. The local governors stepped up the horrors when mere burning failed to secure apostasy. Many victims were killed by water-torture at the sulphur hot springs at Unzen - boiling water being slowly poured into slits in their flesh. From 1632, the martyrs were suspended upside down over a pit, some of them living up to a week. One young Japanese woman endured it for fourteen days, while the aged Jesuit provincial, Christova Ferreira, recanted after six hours. The Jesuits produced manuals teaching the faithful how to endure martyrdom: '. . . prepare yourself: with confession. . . . Never cherish an evil thought towards the official passing the sentence of death or the executioner. . . . While being tortured visualize the Passion of Jesus.’ In 1637 there was a rebellion, provoked by officials torturing the daughter of a Japanese Christian before his eyes. It was suppressed with the armed help of the Dutch, who were thereby able to end the Portuguese trade for good. Christianity survived for some time underground, though even in hiding the Jesuits and the friars quarreled. In 1657-8,600 Christians were rounded up in the countryside around Nagasaki: 411 were executed, 77 died in prison, 99 apostatized. One girl, arrested at the age of eleven, remained a Christian until she died in prison in 1722. At Urakami a cryptoChristian community contrived to survive until it was brought to light in 1865, still baptizing correctly and insisting on clerical celibacy. But the episode as a whole seems to indicate that persecution, if applied with sufficient ruthlessness, intelligence and pertinacity, will eventually succeed, even against the most courageous. Thus a notable and poignant chapter in Christian history ended. At precisely the time when Japanese Christianity was being exterminated, Presbyterians and Independents (Congregationalists) were establishing another elitist religious state on ,the east coast of North America. It was to be the greatest, indeed the only, realized experiment in post-European Christianity. It was also the first and only instance in which we can watch a major Christian community coming into independent being by the light of documentary sources. The birth of Protestant America was a deliberate and self-conscious act of Church-State perfectionism. As Donne said, in his Virginia sermon: 'You shall add persons to this kingdom, and to the Kingdom of Heaven, and add names to the books of our chronicles, and to the book of life.’ Governor Winthrop, sailing the Atlantic on board the Arbelltt, wrote proudly: 'For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill, the eyes of all people are upon us.' These dissenting groups were fleeing an Anglican Jacobean England of whose ‘reformation’ they had despaired. But they were not fleeing to religious liberty and diversity. On the contrary: like the Carolingians, they were seeking to create a total Christian society, where the divine instructions on every aspect of life would be obeyed to the letter, and a city of earth created as the antechamber or prelude to entry into God's city. The original vision of America was Augustinian, rather than Erasmian. There could be no question of religion being ‘private’: civil and religious society were one, inseparable. William Penn, in his Preface to the Frame of Government of Pennsylvania, wrote in 1682: ‘Government seems to me a part of religion itself, a thing sacred in its institution and end. . . it crushes the effects of evil and is as such (though a lower yet) an emanation of the same divine power that is both author and object of pure religion. . . government itself being otherwise as capable of kindness, goodness and charity as a more private society.’ The founding of a colony was an individual and collective contract with the deity to set up a Church-State: 'We whose names 107