 With the Portuguese and Spanish ships came Roman Catholic missionaries. The hegemons at times welcomed the Christians as informants about the West and as foils against Buddhism, but at other times, viciously persecuted them as potential threats in turning the people against the new political order in favor a foreign God. In the end, Christianity was banned from the country entirely (with most finality after the closure of Japan to almost all Western contact after 1637). Therefore, although Christianity enjoyed some initial success in its number of conversions, its overall impact was limited. Formal polemical debates with Buddhists did introduce some new lines of argument to Japan especially concerning creation, afterlife, and teleology. Snippets reappeared in later Shintō arguments, most notably those by Hirata Atsutane (1777–1843), but in general, as a philosophical tradition, Christianity’s impact would be minimal until its reintroduction to Japan in the modern period. The major philosophical innovation of the Edo period would not be Christianity but rather a new form of Confucianism.