It may be noted here that St. Francis Regis had a distinction peculiarly his own. Long after his canonization as a saint, he was proclaimed to have been actually expelled from the Society, and that the public disgrace was prevented only by his death, which occurred before the official papers arrived from Rome. This accusation is trident-like in its wounding power or purpose. It transfixes Regis, and kills his reputation for virtue; then it inflicts a gash on the Society by making it present to the Church, as worthy of being raised to the altars, a man whom it was unwilling to keep in its own houses; finally, it assails the Church and attempts to show that no respect should be had for its decrees of canonization. It was almost unnecessary for the learned Bollandist, Van Ortroy, to show that there is no foundation whatever for this story of the dismissal of St. John Francis Regis from the Society of Jesus. Such are the canonized Jesuits. The Blessed are more numerous. There are ninety-one of them. First in time are the forty Portuguese martyrs under Ignatius de Azevedo, who were slain by the French Huguenots in a harbor of the Azores in the year 1570. Then follow the English witnesses to the Truth. The first to die was Thomas Woodhouse, who was executed in 1573. Between that date and 1582 four others were put to death; among them the illustrious Edmund Campion. Of those who died in the persecutions of Japan, between 1617 and 1627, there are thirty-one Japanese as well as European Jesuits. Rudolf Aquaviva was put to death in Madura in 1583, and John de Britto in 1693. Two Hungarians, Melchior Grodecz and Stephen Pongracz were slain in Hungary in 1619, and Andrew Bobola was butchered by the Cossacks in 1657. There are others among the Society's Blessed who were not martyred, but would have been willing to win their crown in that way, if God so wanted. They are Peter Faber, the first priest of the Society; Peter Canisius, the Apostle of Germany; and the Italian Antonio Baldinucci, a great missionary who used to whip himself to blood, to move the hearts of the hardened sinners around him, and who lighted bonfires of bad books and pictures and playing cards in the public squares to impress his excitable fellow-countrymen. His missionary methods were somewhat like those of Savonarola.