Volume - The Clarence Darrow Collection

1 8
FROM MIRACLES TO MEDICINE.
It seems to have been felt as somewhat strange at first
that Xavier had never alluded to any of these wonderful
miracles ; but ere long a subsidiary legend was developed,
to the effect that one of the brethren asked him one day if
he had raised the dead, whereat he blushed deeply and
" And so I am said to
cried out against the idea, saying :
have raised the dead ! What a misleading man I am !
Some
men brought a youth to me just as if he were dead, who,
when I commanded him to arise in the name of Christ,
straightway arose."
Noteworthy
linus, writing in 1594, tells us that on the voyage from Goa
to Malacca, Xavier having left the ship and gone upon an
is the evolution of other miracles. Tursel-
island, was afterward found by the persons sent in search of
him so deeply absorbed in prayer as to be unmindful of all
things about him. But in the next century Father Bouhours
develops the
"
story as follows : The servants found
the man of God raised from the ground into the air, his eyes
fixed upon heaven, and rays of light about his countenance."
Instructive, also, is a comparison between the successive
accounts of his noted miracle among the Badages at Travan-
core, in 1 544. Xavier in his letters makes no reference to
anything extraordinary; and Emanuel Acosta, in 1571, declares
simply that " Xavier threw himself into the midst of,
the Christians, that reverencing him they might spare th<
rest." The inevitable evolution of the miraculous goes on;
and twenty years later Tursellinus tells us that, at the 01
slaught of the Badages, " they could not endure the majestj
of his countenance and the splendour and rays which issue(
from his eyes, and out of reverence for him they spared th<
others." The process of incubation still goes on durin|
ninety years more, and then comes Father Bouhours's a(
count. Having given Xavier's prayer on the battlefield, Bou^
hours goes on to say that the saint, crucifix in hand, rushf
at the head of the people toward the plain where the enem^
was marching, and " said to them in a threatening voice,
forbid you in the name of the living God to advance farther|
and on His part command you to return in the way yoi
came.' These few words cast a terror into the minds ol
those soldiers who were at the head of the army t they r