thing which may be considered an answer
to prayer or an evidence of the power of religious means to improve the
bodily or spiritual health of those to whom he was sent.

Nor do the letters of his associates show knowledge of any miracles
wrought by him. His brother missionaries, who were in constant and loyal
fellowship with him, make no allusions to them in their communications
with each other or with their brethren in Europe.

Of this fact we have many striking evidences. Various collections of
letters from the Jesuit missionaries in India and the East generally,
during the years of Xavier's activity, were published, and in not one of
these letters written during Xavier's lifetime appears any account of
a miracle wrought by him. As typical of these collections we may take
perhaps the most noted of all, that which was published about twenty
years after Xavier's death by a Jesuit father, Emanuel Acosta.

The letters given in it were written by Xavier and his associates not
only from Goa, which was the focus of all missionary effort and the
centre of all knowledge regarding their work in the East, but from
all other important points in the great field. The first of them were
written during the saint's lifetime, but, though filled with every sort
of detail regarding missionary life and work, they say nothing regarding
any miracles by Xavier.

The same is true of various other similar collections published during
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. In not one of them does any
mention of a miracle by Xavier appear in a letter from India or the East
contemporary with him.

This silence regarding his miracles was clearly not due to any "evil
heart of unbelief." On the contrary, these good missionary fathers were
prompt to record the slightest occurrence which they thought evidence of
the Divine favour: it is indeed touching to see how eagerly they grasp
at the most trivial things which could be thus construed.

Their ample faith was fully shown. One of them, in Acosta's collection,
sends a report that an illuminated cross had been recently seen in the
heavens; another, that devils had been cast out of the natives by the
use of holy water; another, that various cases of disease had been
helped and even healed by baptism; and sundry others sent reports that
the blind and dumb had been restored, and that even lepers had been
cleansed by the proper use of the rites of the Church; but to Xavier no
miracles are imputed b