ther cross which is to be compared to that. How
happy is it, on the other side, to live, in dying daily, and in
conquering our passions, to search after, not our proper interests, but
the interests of Jesus Christ?"

His interior mortification was the principle of these thoughts, in this
holy man; from the first years of his conversion, his study was to gain
an absolute conquest on himself; and he continued always to exhort others
not to suffer themselves to be hurried away by the fury of their natural
desires. He writes thus to the fathers and brethren of Coimbra, from
Malacca:--"I have always present, in my thoughts, what I have heard from
our holy Father Ignatius, that the true children of the Society of Jesus
ought to labour exceedingly in overcoming of themselves.

"If you search our Lord in the spirit of truth," says he to the Jesuits
of Goa, "and generously walk in those ways, which conduct you to him, the
spiritual delights, which you taste in his service, will sweeten all
those bitter agonies, which the conquest of yourselves will cost you. O
my God, how grossly stupid is mankind not to comprehend, that, by a faint
and cowardly resistance of the assaults of the devil, they deprive
themselves of the most pure and sincere delights which life can give
them."

By the daily practice of these maxims, Xavier came to be so absolute a
master of his passions, that he knew not what it was to have the least
motion of choler and impatience; and from thence proceeded partly, that
tranquillity of soul, that equality of countenance, that perpetual
cheerfulness, which rendered him so easy and so acceptable in all
companies.

It is natural for a man, who is extremely mortified, to be chaste; and so
was Xavier, to such a degree of perfection, that we have it certified
from his ghostly fathers, and, amongst others, from the vicar of
Meliapore, that he lived and died a virgin. From his youth upward he had
an extreme horror for impurity; notwithstanding, that he was of a
sanguine complexion, and naturally loved pleasure. While he was a student
at Paris, and dwelt in the college of Sainte Barbe, his tutor in
philosophy, who was a man lost in debauches, and who died of a dishonest
disease, carried his scholars by night to brothel-houses. The abominable
man did all he could towards the debauching of Francis Xavier, who was
handsome, and well shaped, but he could never accomplish his wicked
purpose; so much was the youth estranged