Also, if he had not inspired himself from a cause superior to human interests, where then would he have drawn the constancy and the strength of soul to support what he was obliged to the end to endure and to submit to; that is to say, the unpropitious advice of the learned people, the repulses of princes, the tempests of the furious ocean, the continual watches, during which he more than once risked losing his sight. To that add the combats sustained against the barbarians; the infidelities of his friends, of his companions; the villainous conspiracies, the perfidiousness of the envious, the calumnies of the traducers, the chains with which, after all, though innocent, he was loaded. It was inevitable that a man overwhelmed with a burden of trials so great and so intense would have succumbed had he not sustained himself by the consciousness of fulfilling a very noble enterprise, which he conjectured would be glorious for the Christian name and salutary for an infinite multitude. And the enterprise so carried out is admirably illustrated by the events of that time. In effect, Columbus discovered America at about the period when a great tempest was going to unchain itself against the Church. Inasmuch as it is permitted by the course of events to appreciate the ways of divine Providence, it really seems that the man for whom the Liguria honors herself was destined by special plan of God to compensate Catholicism for the injury which it was going to suffer in Europe. To call the Indian race to Christianity, this was, without doubt, the mission and the work of the Church in this mission. From the beginning, she continued to fulfill it with an uninterrupted course of charity, and she still continues it, having advanced herself recently so far as the extremities of Patagonia. Thus, when compelled by the Portuguese, by the Genoese, to leave without having obtained any result, he went to Spain. He matured the grand plan of the projected discovery in the midst of the walls of a convent, with the knowledge of and with the advice of a monk of the Order of St. Francis d'Assisi, after seven years had revolved. When at last he goes to dare the ocean, he takes care that the expedition shall comply with the acts of spiritual expiation; he prays to the Queen of Heaven to assist the enterprise and to direct its course, and before giving the order to make sail he invokes the august divine Trinity. Then, once fairly at sea, while the waters agitate themselves, while the crew murmurs, he maintains, under God's care, a calm constancy of mind.