It is difficult for me to leave this subject, but more difficult to pursue it as I ought; neither must I presume to detain your majesty by a long address.  The life of Saint Francis Xavier, after it had been written by several authors in the Spanish and Portuguese, and by the famous Padre Bartoli in the Italian tongue, came out at length in French, by the celebrated pen of Father Bohours, from whom I have translated it, and humbly crave leave to dedicate it to your patronage.  I question not but it will undergo the censure of those men, who teach the people, that miracles are ceased.  Yet there are, I presume, a sober party of the Protestants, and even of the most learned among them, who being convinced, by the concurring testimonies of the last age, by the suffrages of whole nations in the Indies and Japan, and by the severe scrutinies that were made before the act of canonization, will not dispute the truth of most matters of fact as they are here related; nay, some may be ingenuous enough to own freely, that to propagate the faith amongst infidels and heathens, such miraculous operations are as necessary now in those benighted regions, as when the Christian doctrine was first planted by our blessed Saviour and his apostles.

The honourable testimonies which are cited by my author, just before the conclusion of his work, and one of them in particular from a learned divine of the church of England,[3] though they slur over the mention of his miracles, in obscure and general terms, yet are full of veneration for his person.  Farther than this I think it needless to prepossess a reader; let him judge sincerely, according to the merits of the cause, and the sanctity of his life, of whom such wonders are related, and attested with such clouds of witnesses; for an impartial man cannot but of himself consider the honour of God in the publication of his gospel, the salvation of souls, and the conversion of kingdoms, which followed from those miracles; the effects of which remain in many of them to this day.

But that it is not lawful for me to trespass so far on the patience of your majesty, I should rather enlarge on a particular reflection, which I made in my translation of this book, namely, that the instructions of the saint, which are copied from his own writings, are so admirably useful, so holy, and so wonderfully efficacious, that they seem to be little less than the product of an immediate inspiration.  So much excellent matter is crowded into so small a compass, that almost every paragraph contains the value of a sermon.  The nourishment is so strong, that it requires but little to be taken at a time.  Where he exhorts, there is not an expression, but what is glowing with the love of God; where he directs a missioner, or gives instructions to a substitute, we can scarcely have a less idea than of a St Paul advising a Timothy, or a Titus.  Where he writes into Europe, he inspires his ardour into sovereign princes, and seems, with the spirit of his devotion, even to burn his colleagues at the distance of the Indies.