ST. FRANCIS XAVIER..
MODERN' missionary reports ought to be interesting reading. As a rule, however, they are not. Ancient missionary reports, those, for instance, which St. Francis Xavier wrote to Ignatius Loyola from India and Japan, have an extraordinary fascination. If
• TS. Lik of St. Pranris Sorter. By &dab Anne Stewart. With Trandadorn tram his Latta; by David Macdonald, B.D. London: Headley Brothers. [Its. ed."14
we say that the letters in this new Life of the saint are more delightful than the Life, we are not praising the translator at the expense of the author ; the whole book is charming.
the early days of the Society of Jesus, Francis Xavier set forth from Spain to preach Christianity in India. A Spanish aristocrat of ancient family and fame, he was educated in Paris at the Sorbonne, fell in hie early youth under the influence of Loyola (who said that "the hardest block he everhad to dowith was the young Francis Xavier in those early days "), and became obsessed with the fervour of evangelization. Except in his love of adventure, he was utterly unlike the conventional Spanish gentleman of his period He had a positive genius for happiness ; his contem- poraries were all impressed by his apparent lightness of heart, sympathetic trimmer, and "mouth full of laughter." The huge unwieldy ships swarming with passengers—the reader may be surprised to hear that Spanish ships built in the sixteenth century could accommodate a thousand persons—never arrived at their destination without great loss of life. In 1141, in such a ship, Xavier went out to his new labours :-
" He was immediately ship's doctor, steward, nurse, evangelist, playmate, tutor, cook, in swift and bewildering succession. Of course, it took a man of genius to do this as he did it, but the sincerity and unselfishness, nay, more, the rapture of personal devotion to Jesus with which this tour de force was carried through, earned for him on the spot the title of Saint—a title so often only acquired through the gracious or even flattering hand of tradition. A ship'u boy who was on board used afterwards in India to tell how this amazing man used to occupy himself in doing all the humblest ser- vices possible to the other passengers, how he washed their linen for them, and how he gave up his cabin to one who was sick, and slept himself on the coil of a rope. He appears soon to have become the most popular man on board, and to have had an immense in- fluence on those around him. First and last he was evangelist. ' I let things go in at their door, but I take care they come out at mine.' "
A pestilence very soon broke out on board :- " He resolved to help the sick as beat he could, and so he presently began to hear the confessions of those who lay a-dying, he cleansed the sick men's bodies, he washed their linen, he dressed their meat, minced it small and fed them with his own hand. He ministered physic to the weak, he most lovingly cheered up those who were sad, and put them that were out of heart in hops of recovery both of body and soul."
When they were all batter (or dead), " he played cards with the young rakes on board," and, by his (to quote Francis Thompson) " divinely unprincipled sleights, his heavenly cunning," he "brought them on their knees before the beauty of holinees." The present writer once heard a devout Roman Catholic declare that Protestantism was " a rule of conduct rather than a religion." Some such thought must enter the mind of the Protestants who study the Life of this saint. His own conduct was as lovely as it was heroic, and he inculcated Christian behaviour at a time when it was sufficiently rare, but he did not give it the place which it holds in the Reformed religion. Here is what he himself wrote of his labours in comforting the sick and dying to whom he minis- tered among other ships' crews after he had begun his evangelistic work
"I was very busy during the three months those eight ships were here in preaching, confessing, visiting the sick, and helping them to a good death, which is very difficult to do with persons who have not lived in great conformity with the law of God, because they lived confidently in continual sins without wishing to break the habit of them."
After all, it is a wonderful thing to be able to help a fellow- creature to " a good death," and whether that or a good life is the chief aim of faith isat leaat arguable. Xavier, though en orthodox. was not in any true sense a superstitious man. He feared super- stition because of its real evil—it saps courage. He tells that when he was arranging to go on a journey from Cape Comorin to Malacca. " many of my devoted friends tried to persuade me against going to such a dangerous land, and, seeing that they could not keep me back, they gave me a number of antidotes against poison. thanked them for their love and goodwill. But I omitted to take the antidotes which, with such love and tears, they gave me. I did not wish to load myself with fear."
Such a man as Xavier was, of course, beloved everywhere, but when we read the treatise he drew up and dispensed among the teachers he sent out, setting forth what we may call Scriptural Christianity as adumbrated in the story of the Fall and fulfilled is the Crucifixion, we are not much surprised that mystic India was not converted. The saint obviously understood the peculiarities of Indian human nature very little, though of human nature ia general he was such an accomplished ;student. After many yeara of work he writes to Loyola that he has become hopeless. "I see clearly, my only Father, by my experience, here, that no road is opening for the perpetuation of the Company by the nativee among the natives. Christianity will last among them only as long as we who are here or those whom you will send from home will last and live." He makes up his mind, therefore, to go to Japan. The Japanese may be said to have enchanted the enchanter. He sot about their conversion with the utmost neat, and upon eatirelj new lines. " In Southern India," as an old chronicler has said,
" he had fished with a drag-net, but here he had to fish with a line." Here was no matter of baptizing and teaching a few prayers to a crowd of youths. He spent three months after he got to Japan in preparation ; and his own linguistic genius—which accounts for the tradition that he had a miraculous gift of tongues—was greatly helped by a Japanese convert whom he had made in India. He writes to Loyola of his first impressions :- " The people [lie is in the province of Satsuma] with whom we have conversed so far are the best yet discovered. In my opinion no people superior to the Japanese will be found among unbelievers. They are of good behaviour, and good generally, and not malicious, marvellously honourable. They esteem honour more than any- thing. They are mostly poor, and neither the nobles nor those who are not esteem poverty as a reproach. They have one quality which I do not think is to be found among any Christians, and it is this—the nobles, however poor they may be, and those who are not nobles, however rich, honour a very poor noble as much as if he were rich, . . Most of them believe in men of ancient times, who, as I have managed to understand, were men who lived as philosophers. Many of them adore the sun, others the moon. They rejoice to hear things conformable to reason, and though there are vices and sins among them, yet when they are given reasons, and shown that what they do is ill done, then what reason defends seems good to them."
Even here, however, Xavier's success was not very great. His last opinion of the Japanese was not quite so high as his first. " Those who come out will be much harassed," he writes, " they will be much more put to it than many think." All day long they will have to answer vexatious questions, and be content to be ridiculed. " Learned men aro needed to reply to their questions, chiefly those who have done well in arts, and those who were sophists." China became now the object of his missionary ambition, but it was never fulfilled. He died on the journey. In his last letter written just before his death he still had hope ; but he thinks there are spiritual forces against him. " The Devil will be tremendously sorry that those of the Company of the Name of Jesus should enter China." Ho hopes, however, to " confound the Devil on this point," adding, surely with a smile " What great glory to God, to con- found by a thing so vile as I am such a grand reputation as the Devil's ! "
His last charge to his correspondent is beautiful and sad. " Master Gaspar, remember the counsels I left you on my departure, and those which I have written to you. Do not neglect to keep them, if presently you think, as others have done, that I am dead." He died in a little Portuguese cabin on the desolate beach of Sanehian; be had become delirious, and "his face was very joyful and beauti. ful." His faithful attendant did not understand the language in which he prayed at the last—it was probably Basque, the language he had spoken as a child in the Castle of Xavier.
Previous page
