nd their souls. From these and other small beginnings
grew, always luxuriant and sometimes beautiful, the vast mass of legends
which we shall see hereafter.

This growth was affectionately garnered by the more zealous and less
critical brethren in Europe until it had become enormous; but it appears
to have been thought of little value by those best able to judge.

For when, in 1562, Julius Gabriel Eugubinus delivered a solemn oration
on the condition and glory of the Church, before the papal legates and
other fathers assembled at the Council of Trent, while he alluded to
a multitude of things showing the Divine favour, there was not the
remotest allusion to the vast multitude of miracles which, according to
the legends, had been so profusely lavished on the faithful during many
years, and which, if they had actually occurred, formed an argument of
prodigious value in behalf of the special claims of the Church.

The same complete absence of knowledge of any such favours vouchsafed
to the Church, or at least of any belief in them, appears in that great
Council of Trent among the fathers themselves. Certainly there, if
anywhere, one might on the Roman theory expect Divine illumination in a
matter of this kind. The presence of the Holy Spirit in the midst of it
was especially claimed, and yet its members, with all their spiritual
as well as material advantages for knowing what had been going on in the
Church during the previous thirty years, and with Xavier's own friend
and colleague, Laynez, present to inform them, show not the slightest
sign of any suspicion of Xavier's miracles. We have the letters of
Julius Gabriel to the foremost of these fathers assembled at Trent, from
1557 onward for a considerable time, and we have also a multitude of
letters written from the Council by bishops, cardinals, and even by the
Pope himself, discussing all sorts of Church affairs, and in not one
of these is there evidence of the remotest suspicion that any of these
reports, which they must have heard, regarding Xavier's miracles, were
worthy of mention.

Here, too, comes additional supplementary testimony of much
significance. With these orations and letters, Eugubinus gives a Latin
translation of a letter, "on religious affairs in the Indies," written
by a Jesuit father twenty years after Xavier's death. Though the letter
came from a field very distant from that in which Xavier laboured, it
was sure, among the general tokens of Divin