The barbarians fled at the sight of the strangers, imagining they were come to revenge the death of the Portuguese, whom they had killed the preceding years.  Xavier followed them into the thickest of their woods; and his countenance, full of mildness, gave them to believe, that he was not an enemy who came in search of them.  He declared to them the motive of his voyage, speaking to them in the Malaya tongue:  For though in the Isle del Moro there were great diversity of languages, insomuch, that those of three leagues distance did not understand each other in their island tongues, yet the Malaya was common to them all.

Notwithstanding the roughness and barbarity of these islanders, neither of those qualities were of proof against the winning and soft behaviour of the saint.  He brought them back to their village, using all expressions of kindness to them by the way, and began his work by singing aloud the Christian doctrine through the streets; after which he expounded it to them, and that in a manner so suitable to their barbarous conceptions, that it passed with ease into their understanding.

By this means he restored those Christians to the faith, who had before forsaken it; and brought into it those idolaters who had refused to embrace it when it was preached to them by Simon Vaz and Francis Alvarez.  There was neither town nor village which the Father did not visit, and where those new converts did not set up crosses and build churches.  Tolo, the chief town of the island, inhabited by twenty-five thousand souls, was entirely converted, together with Momoya.

Thus the Isle del Moro was now to the holy apostle the island of Divine Hope,[1] as he desired it thenceforth to be named; both because those things which were there accomplished by God himself, in a miraculous manner, were beyond all human hope and expectation; and also because the fruits of his labours surpassed the hopes which had been conceived of them, when his friends of Ternate would have made him fear that his voyage would prove unprofitable.

To engage these new Christians, who were gross of apprehension, in the practice of a holy life, he threatened them with eternal punishments, and made them sensible of what hell was, by those dreadful objects which they had before their eyes:  For sometimes he led them to the brink of those gulphs which shot out of their bowels vast masses of burning stones into the air, with the noise and fury of a cannon; and at the view of those flames, which were mingled with a dusky smoke that obscured the day, he explained to them the nature of those pains, which were prepared in an abyss of fire, not only for idolaters and Mahometans, but also for the true believers, who lived not according to their faith.  He even told them, the gaping mouths of those flaming mountains were the breathing places of hell; as appears by these following words, extracted out of one of his letters on that subject, written to his brethren at Rome:  “It seems that God himself has been pleased, in some measure, to discover the habitation of the damned to people had otherwise no knowledge of him.”