y his associates during his life or during several
years after his death.

On the contrary, we find his own statements as to his personal
limitations, and the difficulties arising from them, fully confirmed
by his brother workers. It is interesting, for example, in view of the
claim afterward made that the saint was divinely endowed for his mission
with the "gift of tongues," to note in these letters confirmation of
Xavier's own statement utterly disproving the existence of any such
Divine gift, and detailing the difficulties which he encountered from
his want of knowing various languages, and the hard labour which he
underwent in learning the elements of the Japanese tongue.

Until about ten years after Xavier's death, then, as Emanuel Acosta's
publication shows, the letters of the missionaries continued without any
indication of miracles performed by the saint. Though, as we shall see
presently, abundant legends had already begun to grow elsewhere, not
one word regarding these miracles came as yet from the country which,
according to later accounts accepted and sanctioned by the Church, was
at this very period filled with miracles; not the slightest indication
of them from the men who were supposed to be in the very thick of these
miraculous manifestations.

But this negative evidence is by no means all. There is also positive
evidence--direct testimony from the Jesuit order itself--that Xavier
wrought no miracles.

For not only did neither Xavier nor his co-workers know anything of the
mighty works afterward attributed to him, but the highest contemporary
authority on the whole subject, a man in the closest correspondence with
those who knew most about the saint, a member of the Society of Jesus
in the highest standing and one of its accepted historians, not only
expressly tells us that Xavier wrought no miracles, but gives the
reasons why he wrought none.

This man was Joseph Acosta, a provincial of the Jesuit order, its
visitor in Aragon, superior at Valladolid, and finally rector of the
University of Salamanca. In 1571, nineteen years after Xavier's
death, Acosta devoted himself to writing a work mainly concerning the
conversion of the Indies, and in this he refers especially and with the
greatest reverence to Xavier, holding him up as an ideal and his work as
an example.

But on the same page with this tribute to the great missionary Acosta
goes on to discuss the reasons why progress in the world's convers