Mussulman and heathen people, the extension of the Church in the East to make up for the large slice of territory of which the Reformation had robbed her in the West. It was borne on a great wave of enthusiasm. Its leader was one of the most gifted, devoted, energetic, and successful missionaries the world has ever seen—Francis Xavier, the story of whose life belongs to the annals of the true saints.
Francis Xavier was born in the year 1506, the youngest son of a a nobleman high in the employ of the King of Aragon. While teaching philosophy at the university of Paris he met Ignatius Loyola, then in his early dreams of the counter-revolution, who gradually wrought the spell of his fascinating personality over a reluctant scholar, till at last Xavier yielded to it and became one of the seven who in the year 1534 took the first Jesuit vow. The company intended to go to Palestine in order to convert the Saracens, and they left Paris and travelled as far as Venice with that end in view. Their further journey being delayed, Ignatius set Xavier to work in hospital nursing. Then a war that broke out between the Venetian Republic and the Ottoman Empire compelled the Jesuits to abandon their design of attempting work in the Holy Land, and Xavier was now ordered to join Rodriquez in an Indian mission. He reached Goa in May 1542, and there commenced his famous missionary career. Xavier found the Syrian Christians so dead to the evangelistic vocation of the Church, so absolutely exclusive and self-contained as a religious caste, keeping scrupulously aloof from their Mohammedan neighbours, that they regarded his efforts to convert these people with disapproval. For instance, he says that on one occasion, when he was about to baptise the child of a Mussulman, "the people of Socotra began to cry out that Mussulmans were unworthy of so great a blessing; that they would not let them be baptised, however much they deserved it, and that they would not permit any Mussulman to become a Christian." "Such," he adds, "is their hatred of Mussulmans."[1]
- ↑ Coleridge, Life and Letters of St. Francis Xavier, vol. i. p. 119.
