500 MISCELLANEOUS RECOLLECTIONS II 



miraculous in religion. &quot; I was struck by this idea, and 

 it occurred to me that, of all such examples, that of Fran 

 cis Xavier would be the most fruitful and interesting. For 

 we have, to begin with, his own letters written from the 

 scene of his great missionary labors in the East, in which 

 no miracles appear. We have the letters of his associates 

 at that period, in which there is also no knowledge shown 

 of any miracles performed by him. We also have the 

 great speeches of Laynez, one of Xavier s associates, 

 who, at the Council of Trent, did his best to promote 

 Jesuit interests, and who yet showed no knowledge of any 

 miracles performed by Xavier. We have the very im 

 portant work by Joseph Acosta, the eminent provincial 

 of the Jesuits, written at a later period, largely on the 

 conversion of the Indies, and especially on Xavier s part 

 in it, which, while accepting, in a perfunctory way, the 

 attribution of miracles to Xavier, gives us reasoning 

 which seems entirely to discredit them. Then we have 

 biographies of Xavier, published soon after his death, in 

 which very slight traces of miracles begin to be found ; 

 then other biographies later and later, century after cen 

 tury, in which more and more miracles appear, and earlier 

 miracles of very simple character grow more and more 

 complex and astounding, until finally we see him credited 

 with a vast number of the most striking miracles ever 

 conceived of. In order to develop the subject I have col 

 lected books and documents of every sort bearing upon 

 it from his time to ours, and have given a brief summary 

 of the results in my &quot; History of the Warfare of Science/ 

 But the full development of this subject, which throws 

 intense light upon the growth of miracles in the biog 

 raphies of so many benefactors of our race, must prob 

 ably be left to others. 



It should be treated with judicial fairness. There 

 should not be a trace of prejudice against the church 

 Xavier served. The infallibility of the Pope who canon 

 ized him was indeed committed to the reality of miracles 

 which Xavier certainly never performed; but the church 



