Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 39.djvu/18

8 Acosta, De Quadros, and others, the story wavers between one and two cases; finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been developed. In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were mentioned; but, by the time of Father Bouhours, there were twenty-five.

It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first that Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful miracles; but ere long a subsidiary legend was developed, to the effect that one of the brethren asked him one day if he had raised the dead, whereat he blushed deeply and cried out against the idea, saying: "And so I am said to have raised the dead! What a misleading man I am! Some men brought a youth to me just as if he were dead, who, when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ, straightway arose."

Noteworthy is the evolution of other miracles: Tursellinus, writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa to Malacca, Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an island, was afterward found by the persons sent in search of him so deeply absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all things about him. But in the next century Father Bouhours develops the story as follows: "The servants found the man of God raised from the ground into the air, his eyes fixed upon heaven, and rays of light about his countenance."

Instructive, also, is a comparison between the accounts of his great miracle among the Badages at Travancore in 1544. In Xavier's letters he makes no reference to anything extraordinary; but Acosta, in 1573, declares that "Xavier threw himself into the midst of the Christians, that reverencing him they might spare the rest." The inevitable evolution of this matter goes on; and after twenty years Tursellinus tells us that at the onslaught of the Badages, "they could not endure the majesty of his countenance and the splendor and rays which issued from his eyes, and out of reverence for him they spared the others." The process of incubation still goes on during ninety years more, and then we have Bouhours's account: having given Xavier's prayer on the battle-field, Bouhours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushed at the head of the people toward the plain where the enemy was marching, and "said to them in a threatening voice, 'I forbid you in the name of the living God to advance further, and on his part command you to return in the way you came.' These few words cast a terror into the minds of those soldiers who were at the head of the army; they remained, confounded and without motion. They who marched afterward, seeing that the foremost did not advance, asked the reason of it; the answer was returned from the front ranks that they had before their eyes an unknown person habited in black, of more than