4 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Legends of miracles have thus grown about the lives of all 

 great benefactors of humanity in early ages, and about saints 

 and devotees. Throughout human history the lives of such per- 

 sonages, almost without exception, have been accompanied or fol- 

 lowed by a literature in which legends of miraculous powers form 

 a very important part a part constantly increasing until a dif- 

 ferent mode of looking at Nature and of weighing testimony 

 causes miracles to disappear. While modern thought holds the 

 testimony to the great mass of such legends in all ages as worth- 

 less, it is very widely acknowledged that great and gifted beings 

 who endow the earth with higher religious ideas, "gaining the 

 deepest hold upon the hearts and minds of multitudes, may at 

 times exercise such influence upon those about them that the sick 

 in mind or body are helped or healed. 



We have within the modern period very many examples 

 which enable us to study the evolution of legendary miracles, 

 and among the most instructive of them all is the life of St. 

 Francis Xavier. One of the noblest characters in the sixteenth 

 century, he sacrificed the brilliant career which he had begun at 

 Paris, and gave himself entirely to missionary work in the far 

 East. Among the various tribes of lower India and afterward 

 in Japan he wrought untiringly, toiling through village after 

 village, collecting the natives by the sound of a hand-bell, try- 

 ing to teach them the simplest Christian formulas, and thus he 

 brought myriads of them to a nominal confession of the Christian 

 faith. After twelve years of such efforts, seeking new conquests 

 for religion, he sacrificed his life on the desert island of San Chan. 



During his career as a missionary he wrote great numbers 

 of letters which were preserved and have since been published ; 

 these and the letters of his contemporaries exhibit clearly all the 

 features of his life. His own writings are very minute, and enable 

 us to follow him and his doings fully. ~No account of a miracle 

 wrought by him appears either in his own letters or in any con- 

 temporary document. At the outside but two or three things oc- 

 curred in his whole life, as exhibited so fully by himself and his 

 contemporaries, for which the most earnest devotee could claim 

 anything like divine interposition ; and these are such as may be 

 read in the letters of nearly all fervent missionaries, Protestant 

 as well as Catholic. For example, in the beginning of his career, 

 during a journey in Europe with an ambassador, one of the serv- 

 ants in fording a stream got into deep water and was in danger of 

 drowning. Xavier tells us that the ambassador prayed very ear- 

 nestly, and that the man finally struggled out of the stream. But 

 within sixty years after his death, at his canonization, and by va- 

 rious biographers, this had been magnified into a miracle, and 

 appears in the various histories dressed out in glowing colors. 



