Xavier knew nothing of the language and did not seem to think it necessary at any time to learn. He went from village to village with a hand bell, getting the crowd of boys to repeat after him words of the Creed, the Lord’s Prayer and Ave Maria, and then as opportunity offered baptising old and young wholesale. He admits his difficulties when he writes: “Conceive therefore what kind of life I live in this place, what kind of sermons I am able to address to the assemblies when they who should repeat my address to their people do not understand me or I them. I ought to be an adept in dumb show. Yet I am not without work, for I want no interpreter to baptise infants just born or those which their parents bring, nor to relieve the famished and the naked who come in my way. So I devote myself to these two kinds of good works and do not regard my time as lost.”[4] So little did his catechumens understand what they were doing that he admits to his companion Mansilla that he found they were stumbling over the very first sentence of the creed and saying “I will” (_volo_) instead of “I believe” (_credo_) in their baptismal services. Leaving the pearl fishers after a year’s work the great Jesuit turned his attention to the conversion of princes and kings. He gained great influence over the King of Travancore, using it for the protection of Christians, for many of the members of the old Syrian Church were living on the western coast of his dominions and suffered much from the oppression of tax gatherers. The truth of his labours is sadly exaggerated and overladen with the legends of his Jesuit biographers, who relate miracles performed by him even so improbable as the raising of the dead. Twenty years after his death, when he was canonized by Gregory XV as a Saint, these miracles were set forth to his honour, among them being a gift of tongues by which without any learning he could fluently speak any language, a statement which his own letters prove to be a fiction. It is not within the scope of the present work to deal with anything beyond his three years’ work in India, which leaves the greater portion of his deeply interesting career unrecorded. This first attempt to evangelize the world certainly gave him no content or satisfaction. He writes on 14th January, 1549, on the eve of his leaving for Japan, these words of keen disappointment, speaking of India:--“The natives, on account of the enormity of their wickedness, are as little as possible fitted to embrace the Christian religion. They so abhor it that they have no patience to listen to us if we introduce the subject. To ask them to become Christians is like asking them to submit to death.”[5]