Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/17

Rh Xavier, one day needing money, asked Vellio, one of his friends, to let him have some. Vellio gave him the key of a safe containing thirty thousand gold pieces. Xavier took three hundred and returned the key to Vellio, telling him what he had taken. At this Vellio reproached Xavier for not taking more, saying that he had expected to give him half of all that the strong-box contained. Xavier, touched by this generosity, told Vellio that the time of his death should be made known to him, that he might have time to repent of any sins and prepare for eternity. But twenty-six years later, Vitelleschi, in his Life of Xavier, telling the story, says that Vellio on opening the safe found that all his money remained as he had left it, and that none at all had disappeared; in fact, that there had been a miraculous restoration. On his blaming Xavier for not taking the money, Xavier declares to Vellio that not only should he be apprised of the moment of his death, but that he should always have all the money he needed. Still later biographers improved the account further, declaring that Xavier promised Vellio that the strong-box should always contain money sufficient for his needs.

In 1682, one hundred and thirty years after Xavier's death, appeared his biography by Father Bouhours; and this became a classic. In it miracles of all kinds were enormously multiplied, and many new ones given. Miracles few and small in Tursellinus are many and great in Bouhours, and among the new ones is a miraculous draught of fishes. It must be remembered that Bouhours, writing ninety years after Tursellinus, could hardly have had access to any really new sources; Xavier had been dead one hundred and thirty years, and of course all the natives upon whom he had wrought his miracles, and their children and grandchildren, were gone. It can not then be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new witnesses, nor could he have had anything new in the way of contemporary writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of Xavier's time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly the ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any account of his miracles to writing. Nevertheless, the miracles of healing given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than ever. But there was far more than this. Although during the lifetime of Xavier there is, neither in his own writings nor in any contemporary account the least indication of resurrections from the dead, we find that shortly after his death stories of resurrections wrought by him during his lifetime began to appear. A simple statement of the growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of miraculous accounts generally. At first it was affirmed that some people at Cape Comorin said that he resuscitated one person; then it was said that there were two persons; then in various authors,