Japan and the Japanese

42 JAPAN. A. .>. 15421550.
Moluccas, a seminary for the education of boys of superior abilities,
to be collected from various nations, who, upon arriving
at matu
rity, might preach the gospel, each in his own country an institu
tion which the Council of Trent not long after warmly approved.
By the efforts of (jalvano and others, a similar seminary, sometimes
called Paul's, and sometimes Of the Holy Faith, had been
erected at (aoa, lately made the seat of an Indian bishopric, and it
was at this
seminary, endowed and enriched by the spoils of many
heathen temples, that the Japanese Angiro was placed bj Xavier tor
his education. The names which he adopted at his baptism, Paul
of the Holy Faith, were, as it thus appears, those of the seujinary
at which he had been educated.
But the efforts hitherto made in India on behalf of the Catholic
faith, if earnest, had been desultory. The establishment of the
order of Jesuits, in 1540, laid the foundation for a systematic attack
upon the religious systems of the East, and an attempt at a spiritual
revolution there, neither less vigorous nor less pertinacious than
that which, for the forty years preceding, had been carried on
by the new comers from the West against the political, commercial
and social institutions of those countries.
The leader in this enterprise was Francis Aspilcota, surnamed
Xavier, one of the seven associates of whom the infant Society of
Jesus, destined soon to become so powerful and so famous, origiat
the foot of
nally consisted. He was born in 1 50G, in Navarre,
the Pyrenees, the youngest son of a noble and numerous family,
of whom the younger members, and he among the rest, bore the
surname of Xavier. Not inclining to the profession of amis, em-
braced by the rest of the family, after preliminary studies at home,
he went to Paris, and was first a student at the College of St. Burbe,
and afterwards, at the age of twenty-two, professor of philosophy iu
that of Beauvais. It was in this latter station that he first
became acquainted with Ignatius Loyola, who, fifteen years older
than Xavier, had come to Paris to pursue, as preparatory to a
course of theology, those rudimentary studies which had not been
thought necessary for the military destination of his earlier days.
This remarkable Spaniard, whose military career had been cut short
by a wound, which made him a cripple, had already been for years
a religious devotee; and having been from his youth thoroughly