n; and the Father, who
easily perceived that the government of Gomez was not in the least
conformable to the spirit of their Institute, would at that time have
withdrawn him from Goa, and sent him to Ormuz: but the viceroy, to whom
Gomez had been powerfully recommended by one of the chief ministers of
Portugal, would not suffer him to be transplanted, or that his authority
should be taken from him: so that all Xavier could do, was to temper and
draw off from his jurisdiction, by establishing Father Paul de Camerine
superior-general of all the missions of the Indies.

But when once the saint was departed from Goa, Gomez usurped the whole
government; alleging, for his own justification, that Father Rodriguez
had given him an absolute power; and that Camerine was a poor honest
creature, more fit to visit the prisons and hospitals of Goa, than to
manage the missions, and govern the colleges, of the Society. He began
with prescribing new rules to his inferiors; and declared to them, in
express terms, that they must return into their mothers' wombs, that they
might be born again into a spiritual life, and transformed into other
men. Not that they had any need of reformation, they who were themselves
the models of a perfect life; but the business was, that he had brought
with him out of Europe, I know not what contrivance of new living, framed
according to his own fanciful speculations. He undertook then to change
their domestic discipline, and to regulate the studies of the Jesuits by
the model of the university of Paris, where he had been a student in his
youth. There was nothing but change and innovation every day; and he
exercised his power with such haughtiness and magisterial hardness, that
it appeared more like the dictates of an absolute monarchy, than the
injunction of a religious superior: For, to make himself obeyed and
feared, he went so far as to tell them he had received an unlimited power
from Father Simon Rodriguez, in virtue of which he could imprison, or
remand into Portugal, any person who should presume to oppose his
government.

His conduct was not less irregular in respect of the young men who were
educated in the seminary, of whom the greatest part were Indians. Though
they were yet but novices in the faith, and scarcely to be accounted
Christians, he enjoined them the practices of the most perfect interior
life, which they could not possibly understand; and as they could not
acquit themselves of those