The Latin Hymn-writers and Their Hymns

by Samuel Willoughby Duffield

At the Portuguese Court in Lisbon, both Xavier and his companion were diligent in their religious work. The morals of the capital were quite reformed, and when it came time for the ships to sail to the East the king would only spare Xavier and detained Rodriguez, by the advice of Loyola, further to improve the affairs at home.

Xavier now sailed as Nuncio with papal commendation and with a poverty of outfit which had its due effect upon his companions on board the ship. The vessel itself was one of those great galleons of Spanish or Portuguese origin, carrying often a thousand persons, and having from four to seven decks. They were huge, unwieldy constructions and were generally freighted with large amounts of rich merchandise. The course was that pursued by Vasco da Gama—around the Cape of Good Hope and into the Indian Ocean—and the voyage often lasted beyond eight months. It is quaintly related of travellers by these precarious sea-paths that they used to take their shrouds and winding-sheets with them in case they died by the way.

The company on shipboard was as bad as the provisions, which were often execrable. The peninsular sailors never had the art either of discipline or of storing a ship and supplying what was needful for a voyage, as the English sea-kings had it. Hence their vessels were great floating caravansaries of human beings, full of the scum and offscouring of society—with lords and ladies on the quarter-deck, and robbers and murderers, harlots and gamblers down below. The crew was as prompt as that of Jonah’s ship to cry upon their gods whenever the wind blew. Such inventions as the ship’s pump, the chain-cable, and the bowsprit were not known to them. And when we see Sir Richard Grenville in the little Revenge fighting fifteen great Dons for as many hours, or Sir John Hawkins beating his way out of the harbor of Vera Cruz when the Jesus of Lubec was lost by Spanish treachery, we see how utterly cumbrous and awkward these galleons were when compared with English vessels.

Sickness also, in the form of fevers and scurvy, was very frequent. And there was such laxity of discipline that a six months’ voyage generally turned the great hulk into a hell of misery and riot. Here, therefore, Xavier was in his element. He slept on the deck; he begged his own bread, and the delicacies pressed upon him by the captain he divided among the neediest of the poor sufferers; he invented games to amuse those who were inclined toward amusement; and by degrees he commingled his sympathy and friendly offices with the necessities of the crew and passengers until they called him the “holy father.” He constantly preached, taught, and labored in this manner until he finally succumbed to an epidemic fever which broke out when they were not far from Mozambique. Here he was landed and for a time was in hospital, at length completing his voyage to India in a different ship from that in which he had first embarked.

Scattered through his story, both then and afterward, we have accounts of various miracles, of his exhibition of a spirit of prophecy, and eventually of his raising the dead. These demand a moment’s consideration. He is said, for instance, to have predicted the loss of the San Jago, in which he sailed from Portugal and which was wrecked after he left her. He did the same with one or two other vessels and assured several persons of their own impending death or misfortune. Sometimes he was observed to speak as though he were holding conversation with unseen companions, and he was apparently conscious of events which were afterward found to have occurred at the very time in distant places. There is also a series of phenomena connected with the “gift of tongues” in his case, by which this power appears to have been intermittent, or at least dependent to a great degree upon a remarkable intensity of scholarship and keenness of analysis combined with a powerful memory. It is not claimed that he exercised this gift in such a manner as “to converse in a foreign tongue the moment he landed in this foreign country.” And then there is a further class of remarkable experiences connected with fevers and diseases and the raising of the dead.

Of these latter miracles it may be well to treat first. He is said to have raised up Anthony Miranda, an Indian, who had been bitten by a cobra; to have restored four dead persons at Travancore; to have resuscitated a young girl in Japan and a child in Malacca, and to have actually brought to the ship, alive and well, a lad who had fallen overboard and been apparently lost. These incidents are related with great gravity by the biographers and are accepted by the faithful as being strictly true. To impugn them is as if one impugned the Scriptures. Nevertheless there is an opening for scepticism in sundry cases, and it may be that we shall do well to agree with the saint’s own statement made to Doctor Diego Borba. “Ah, my Jesus!” he answered, “can it be said that such a wretch as I have been able to raise the dead? Surely, my dear Diego, you have not believed such folly? They brought a young man to me whom they supposed to be dead; I commanded him to arise, and the common people, who make a miracle of everything, gave out the report that a dead man had been raised to life.” For the rest, we may well believe that the same exaggeration and lack of scientific attention to details have accompanied the various accounts, in some such manner as appears in the little sketch of his personal characteristics which a young Coquimban named Vaz has given to us. This enthusiastic admirer describes his going afoot with a patched and faded garment and an old black cloth hat. He took nothing from the rich or great unless he applied it to the uses of the poor. He spoke languages fluently without having learned them, and the crowds which flocked to hear him often amounted to five or six thousand persons. He celebrated Mass in the open air and preached from the branches of a tree when he had no other pulpit. But of this healing of the sick and raising of the dead we are not offered any better testimonials than the “Acts of his Canonization.” Moreover, in a manner quite contrary to the experiences recorded in the Gospels, these various miracles seem to be looked upon as the decisive stroke of Christian policy. Upon their occurrence tribes and kingdoms bow before the truth—a thing which did not happen at the tomb of Lazarus, or before the walls of Nain, or within the house of Jairus. In those cases the evangelists are content to tell us that the influence was limited and confined to a very moderate area.

Yet when we come to the cures of sick people, to the singular predictions, and to the exalted condition into which Xavier must often have been lifted, we must allow to the man a very high degree of mystical and mesmeric and even clairvoyant power. We are wise enough nowadays to observe the influence of a devoted personality, as when Florence Nightingale traverses the hospital wards at Scutari, or David Livingstone moves through savage tribes, to his dying hour at Lake Lincoln. And when profound Church historians will not altogether discredit the miracles of the Nicene Age which Ambrose and Augustine relate, it causes us to be charitable even toward the miracles of Bernard of Clairvaux, who recorded at large his own sense of uneasiness respecting his power of curing the sick. But it somewhat relieves the mind when the very chapters which relate these experiences of St. Francis Xavier, mention also that a crab came out of the sea and brought him his lost crucifix, and that after he had lived in a certain house two children and a woman fell out of the window at different times and received not so much as a single bruise, though they dropped from an immense height upon the sea-wall. The credulity which includes such palpable absurdities must surely have exposed itself to misstatements and exaggerations in other directions.

It is far pleasanter for us to follow Xavier from his arrival at Goa, May 6th, 1542, to the fisheries of Cape Comorin; thence to Malacca, and so to the Banda Islands, Amboyna, and the Moluccas in 1546; again to Malacca in 1547; to Ceylon and back to Goa in 1548, and finally to Japan. In 1551 he planned a visit to China, but was disappointed, and at the moment when he was hoping to accomplish a great purpose he died on the island of San Chan, December 22d, 1552, at the early age of forty-six years.

Closely studying himself and his methods we find him greatly and always devout, his breviary, however, being his Bible. He prayed much and labored incessantly. His charity to small and great was untiring. He would go through the streets ringing a little bell and calling people to come to religious worship, being frequently attended by a throng of children who seem to have loved him and been beloved by him. He had noble and sweet and modest traits in his character. But we often notice the reliance he places on baptism—sometimes conferring this rite until his arm dropped from weariness. And we observe how much of the wisdom of the serpent can be discerned in his ways with the people whom he desired to secure.

The indefatigable exertions of Xavier are above all praise. He never appears to have slackened in his zeal, nor does he ever show hesitation, doubt, or uncertainty of any kind. On one occasion when roused by a great crisis he displayed a military authority worthy of Loyola himself. He stood once in front of an invading host of Badages and forbade them to attack the Paravans, shouting to them, “In the name of the living God I command you to return whence you came.” No wonder that the semi-barbarous people were affected by this fearless and singular presence, and spoke of Xavier as a person of gigantic stature dressed in black and whose flashing eyes dazzled and daunted them.