[1] See Eusebius, Hist. Eccl. v. 10.
[2] Jerome, Epist. lxx.
CHAPTER II.
THE FRIAR AND THE LUTHERAN.
It was Marco Polo, after his travels in the East at the end of the thirteenth century, who first awoke the Church in Europe to take some interest in the Christian community far away in India. He told the tale of what he had seen on his visit to Malabar, how that the shrine of St. Thomas attracted many pilgrims and that cures were wrought by a handful of sacred dust from his grave. Also that the church which contained the body of the martyr was supported by the produce of the groves of coco-nut palm trees, and that in the vicinity were many Jews. Here then was the ancient Syrian Church preserving the flickering flame of truth amid the darkness of heathenism.
Meanwhile the two great Orders of the Middle Ages, the Franciscans and the Dominicans, were, at the bidding of the Popes, carrying far and wide the missions by which the all-embracing power and authority of Rome would assert itself, not only in making converts, but in bringing the political power of courts into its grasp and subjection. In the year 1319 a group of friars sailed for the Far East and found themselves on the shores of India (near the modern Bombay), and the leader of them, Jordan or Jordanus, during a stay of two years, visited the Nestorian churches and travelled amid many perils, for the leaders of Islam were oppressing the Christians. The true mission of Jordan was doubtless to bring the Nestorians to acknowledge the supremacy of the Pope, for up to this time they accepted only the rule of their own Archbishop at Bandas (Baghdad). He bitterly complains in his letters to the Pope of the disorder in doctrine which prevails. Not even the rite of baptism is administered and many are so ignorant that they believe Saint Thomas the Great to be the Christ. This friar had, however, the saving quality of optimism, especially in the work of his own Order, for he says, “Of the conversion of those nations of India I say this, that if there were two or three hundred good friars who would faithfully and fervently preach the Catholic faith, there is not a year that would not see more than ten thousand persons converted to the Christian faith.”
With the dawn of the sixteenth century we meet the awakening of that spirit of discovery which was to affect so deeply the missionary enterprise of the world. Vasco da Gama had already visited India in May, 1498, and henceforward from Portugal, the faithful son of the Romish Church, sailed ships of exploration and adventure to establish trading colonies, upon the decks of which were hundreds of friars. Churches, monasteries, and colleges sprang up wherever they landed, and Goa, raised to the dignity of a bishopric, became the flourishing centre of Church and Empire. One of the most significant events of this age, however, was the meeting together on the Feast of the Assumption, in the year 1534, of Ignatius Loyola and six friends to establish the Society of Jesus. One of them was a young man who had been reared amid Protestant influences and was related on his mother’s side to the Kings of Navarre. This was Francis Xavier, whose name and character is a glowing point in the history of that time. Shorn of the legends which his Church has woven about his career, the great missionary cannot fail to command the attention and admiration of the historian, and, as his first sphere was India, he deserves a special reference in the early history of Christian missions there. At first his royal patron, John III of Portugal, hesitated whether he should not keep Xavier at home, but eventually he was sent with the new Viceroy and a suite of notables in a well-equipped fleet of seven vessels to Goa on the 7th April, 1541. The young monk, burning with missionary zeal, looked across the waters with a beating heart. He did not lack authority, temporal and spiritual, for he went out as Papal Nuncio to the new world, with full powers to propagate the faith of the Church of Rome in all the East, was recommended to the care of David, King of Ethiopia, and all the princes and governors were urged to pay him respect and service. But his heart’s desire was not dependent upon these. He came as one ready to suffer and bear trials, and to the end of his life these were bravely borne. The inner spirit and purpose of the man is best revealed in his letters, and when he arrived at Goa, and saw what awaited him, he wrote thus home to his friends:
“I am persuaded that those who truly love the Cross of Christ esteem a life thus passed in affliction to be a happy one and regard an avoidance of the cross or an exemption from it as a kind of death. For what death is more bitter than to live without Christ when once we have tasted His preciousness; or to desert Him, that we may follow our own desires? Believe me, no cross is to be compared with this cross. On the other hand, how happy it is to live in dying daily and in mortifying our own will and in seeking not our own but the things that are Jesus Christ’s! I trust that through the merits and prayers of our holy mother the Church, in which is my chief confidence, and through the prayers of its living members, to which you belong, our Lord Jesus Christ will sow the Gospel seed in this heathen land by my instrumentality, though a worthless servant. Especially if He shall be pleased to use such a poor creature as I am for so great a work it may shame the men who are born for great achievements, and it may stir up the courage of the timid, when forsooth they see me, who am but dust and ashes and the most abject of men, a visible witness of the great want of labourers.”[3]
With a spirit so brave and aims so high and self-renouncing, one cannot help wondering what he might not have done had he preached a purer creed and been less fettered and influenced by political association. His landing at Goa, with the whole heathen and Mohammedan millions to win for Christ, was rather a bad beginning, since being under the orders of the Viceroy he had to limit himself to the pearl fishers at Tuticorin. Here he had to make Christians in order to bring a valuable industry to Portuguese advantage, an arrangement having already been made whereby the fishermen were willing to change their religion if they might be protected against the Mohammedans.
Xavier knew nothing of the language and did not seem to think it necessary at any time to learn. He went from village to village with a hand bell, getting the crowd of boys to repeat after him words of the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria, and then as opportunity offered baptising old and young wholesale. He admits his difficulties when he writes: “Conceive therefore what kind of life I live in this place, what kind of sermons I am able to address to the assemblies when they who should repeat my address to their people do not understand me or I them. I ought to be an adept in dumb show. Yet I am not without work, for I want no interpreter to baptise infants just born or those which their parents bring, nor to relieve the famished and the naked who come in my way. So I devote myself to these two kinds of good works and do not regard my time as lost.”[4] So little did his catechumens understand what they were doing that he admits to his companion Mansilla that he found they were stumbling over the very first sentence of the creed and saying “I will” (volo) instead of “I believe” (credo) in their baptismal services.