Ignatius' supreme quality was his marvellous ability to select the men who would be of service in great undertakings. St. Francis Xavier, who became the great Apostle of the Indies, acknowledged that he owed under Providence his call to this sublime work entirely to Ignatius, who had turned his ambition from the pursuit of scholarly distinction to a life directed to the extension of Christianity. The brilliant young professor at the University of Paris who at first rather despised the elderly student, apparently slow-witted because of unaccustomedness to the task of study, came to look upon Ignatius almost as a second father, and his expression "What doth it profit a man to gain the whole world and lose his own soul?" became for him the keynote of existence. Once he had given himself to the new purpose in life, Francis Xavier took nothing back, and when Ignatius obtained for him the privilege of going to the Indies as an apostle he succeeded in the ten years between 1542 and 1552 in planting Christianity firmly among the natives in both India and Japan, and was only prevented from accomplishing as much for China by his premature death in 1552. As it was, he left the inspiration of his example to be the spirit of the greatest missionary work in the East that has ever been known. This work of the missions was to be one of the principal {211} features of Jesuit accomplishment during the after-time. While they conducted some of the most important colleges in Europe and came to have more than one hundred thousand students under their care within a hundred years, their missionaries were soon to be found in every land. The century of Jesuit missions in Japan after St. Francis Xavier's time is one of the most glorious, edifying and romantic chapters in Church history. They succeeded in converting many thousands of Japanese and organizing them into Christian communities. Unfortunately political troubles within, commercial rivalries of various kinds from without eventually led to the persecution of the Christians. The Japanese Christians showed then that they knew how to die with the firmness of the early martyrs. All the priests were put to death or banished, and yet so thorough had been the training of the native catechists that even in our own time, with the opening up of Japan to missionary work again, village communities have been found in which the Christian faith was preserved.