Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 24.djvu/763

Rh XAVIER 717 posture of political affairs, they arrived in Venice, where they found Ignatius awaiting them. As some months must needs elapse before they could sail for the Holy Land, Ignatius determined that the time should be spent partly in hospital work at Venice and later in the journey to Home, there to obtain their credentials. Accordingly, Xavier devoted himself for nine weeks to the care of the patients in the hospital for incurables, at the end of which time he set out with eight companions for Rome, where Pope Paul III. received them favourably, sanctioned their enterprise, and gave them facilities for obtaining ordina tion. Returning to Venice, Xavier was ordained priest on Midsummer Day 1537 ; but the outbreak of war between Venice and Turkey put an end to the Palestine expedition. Hereupon the companions agreed to disperse for a twelve month s home mission work in the Italian cities, and Boba- dilla and Xavier betook themselves, first to Monselice, thence to Bologna, where they remained till summoned to Rome by Ignatius at the close of 1538, to consider his plans for erecting the company into a religious order, with a formal constitution under papal sanction. The draft rules were signed by the whole number on 15th April 1 539, though it w r as not till 1540 that the pope s confirma tion was given, nor was it published till 1541. While the remaining members dispersed anew r for work in various parts of Italy, Ignatius retained Xavier at Rome as secret ary to the new institute. Meanwhile John III., king of Portugal, had resolved on sending a mission to his East Indian dominions, and, at the instance of his minister Govea, applied through his envoy Pedro de Mascarcnhas to the pope for six Jesuits to undertake the task. Ignatius could spare but two, and chose Rodriguez and Bobadilla for the purpose ; and the former set out at once for Lisbon to confer with the king. Bobadilla, sent for to Rome, arrived there just before Mascarenhas was about to depart, but fell too ill to respond to the call made on him. Hereupon Ignatius on 15th March 1540 told Xavier to leave Rome the next day with Mascarenhas, in order to join Rodriguez in the Indian mission. Xavier complied, merely waiting long enough to obtain the pope s benediction, and set out for Lisbon, where he was presented to the king, and soon won his entire confidence, attested notably by procuring for him from the pope four briefs, one of them appointing him papal nuncio in the Indies. On 7th April 1541, his thirty-fifth birthday, he sailed from Lisbon with Martin Alphonso de Souza, governor of India, and, refusing all accommodations for the voyage offered him, except a few books and some clothing, lived amongst the common sailors on board, ministering to their religious and temporal needs, especially during an outbreak of scurvy. After five months voyage the ship reached Mozambique, where the captain resolved to winter, and Xavier was prostrated with a severe attack of fever. When the voyage was resumed, the ship touched at the Mohammedan town of Melinde, whose sultan told Xavier of the marked decline of Islam. But neither there nor at the island of Socotra, the next point of arrival, where Christianity was equally declining, was the missionary able to remain long enough to attempt any work; and he finally reached Goa on 6th May 1542. Exhibiting his brief to Joao d Albuquerque, bishop of Goa, he asked his permission to officiate in the diocese, and at once began a mission, walking through the streets ringing a small bell, and telling all those attracted by its sound to come themselves, and send their children and servants, to the &quot; Christian doctrine&quot; or catechetical instruc tion in the principal church. He spent five months actively employed in Goa, where he is stated to have effected much reformation in morals, and then turned his attention to the fishery coast, extending from Cape Comorin to the Paumbum Pass, where he had heard that the Paravas, a tribe engaged in the pearl-fishery, had relapsed into heathen ism after having professed Christianity. He laboured assiduously amongst them for fifteen months, and at the end of 1543 returned to Goa to procure colleagues for the mission. Travancore was his next field of action, and there he is said to have succeeded in founding no fewer than forty- five Christian settlements, each with numerous converts. It is to be noted that his own letters contain, both at this time and later on, express disproof of his possession of that miraculous gift of tongues with which he was credited even in his lifetime, and which is attributed to him in the Breviary office for his festival. Not only was he obliged to employ interpreters, but he relates that in their absence he was compelled to use signs only, and he never appears to have displayed any special aptitude for acquiring new languages. He sent a missionary to the isle of Manaar, and himself visited Ceylon, where he proved unsuccessful in an effort to invoke Portuguese interference in a dynastic dispute, and betook himself thence to Meliapur, the tradi tionary tomb of St Thomas the apostle, which he reached in April 1544, continuing there four months. His next sphere of active work was Malacca, which he reached on 25th September 1545, and where he remained another four months, but had comparatively little success, and abandoned it at last as wholly intractable. While there he addressed a letter to King John of Portugal, urging him to set up the Inquisition in Goa to repress Judaism, and was readily listened to, although the actual erection of the tribunal did not take place till 1560, some years after his own death. After a missionary expedition to Amboyna and other isles of the Molucca group, he returned to Malacca in July 1547, and found three Jesuit recruits from Europe awaiting him. An attack upon Malacca by the sultan of Acheen, which the governor w r as disinclined to punish, aroused the warlike temper which slumbered in Xavier s breast, and he compelled the organization of an expedition to chastise the invaders, which proved a triumph and much increased his local influence. While in Malacca he met one Han-Siro, a Japanese exile (known to the bio graphies as Anger), whose conversation fired him with zeal for the conversion of Japan. But he first paid a series of visits to the scenes of his former labours, and then, return ing to Malacca, took ship for Japan, accompanied by Han- Siro, now known as Paul of the Holy Faith. After a perilous voyage they reached Kagoshima, at the south of Kiusiu, the southernmost of the larger Japanese islands, and in the territory of the daimio of Satsuma. Kago shima was Han-Siro s birthplace, and he was himself heartily welcomed by his friends, whom he induced to extend their good-will to his companions. The daimio, who desired to secure the Portuguese trade, was friendly at first ; but, finding that the merchant vessels preferred the safer anchorage of Firando (or Hirado) far to the north of his fief, he withdrew his permission to preach and threatened converts with the penalty of death. Xavier judged it well to move elsewhither, and travelled on foot to Firando, making some converts on the road, and prov ing far more successful at Firando itself than in Kagoshima. Thence he proceeded to the capital of the empire, the city then known as Miako, subsequently as Kioto, and now as Saikio or &quot;Avestern capital.&quot; But the mikados or emperors had been little more than puppets under the control of the shoguns or hereditary commanders-in-chief for some centuries before this time, so that Xavier judged that he could work more effectually at the courts of the great daimioa than at that of their nominal sovereign. He also noticed that asceticism and poverty had no such attractive power in Japan as they had exercised in India, and deter mined to try the effect of some measure of pomp and dis play on his return from Miako. Making but a brief stay