gospel.

For what remains, though he was ever forming new designs, as if he were
to live beyond an age, yet he laboured as if he had not a day to live,
and so tugged at the work which he had in hand, that two or three days
and nights passed over his head without once thinking to take the least
manner of nourishment. In saying his office, it often happened to him to
leave, for five or six times successively, the same canonical hour, for
the good of souls, and he quitted it with the same promptitude that
afterwards he resumed it: he broke off his very prayers when the most
inconsiderable person had the least occasion for him; and ordered, when
he was in the deepest of his retirements, that if any poor man, or
even but a child, should desire to be instructed, he might be called from
his devotions.

No man perhaps was ever known to have run more dangers, both by land and
sea, without reckoning into the account the tempests which he suffered
in ten years of almost continual navigation. It is known, that being at
the Moluccas, and passing from isle to isle, he was thrice shipwrecked,
though we are not certain of the time or places; and once he was for
three days and nights together on a plank, at the mercy of the winds and
waves. The barbarians have often shot their arrows at him, and more than
once he fell into the hands of an enraged multitude. One day the Saracens
pursued him, and endeavoured to have stoned him; and the Brachmans
frequently sought after him to have murdered him, even to that point of
merciless barbarity, as to get fire to all the houses where they imagined
he might lie concealed. But none of all these dangers were able to
affright him; and the apprehension of dying could never hinder him from
performing his ordinary functions. It seemed that even dangers served to
the redoubling of his courage, and that, by being too intrepid, he
sometimes entered into the extreme of rashness. Being at Japan, he
reprehended the king of Amanguchi so severely for the infamy and scandal
of his vices, that Father John Fernandez, (who served him for
interpreter, as being more conversant than the saint in the language of
the court) was amazed and trembled in pronouncing what the Father put
into his mouth; as we are given to understand in a letter written by the
same Fernandez. Xavier, one day perceiving the fear of his companion,
forbade him absolutely either to change or soften any of his words: "I
obeyed him," says Fernandez,