“God is my witness, my dearest Father,” says he in another letter, “how much I wish to behold you in this life, that I might communicate to you many matters, which cannot be remedied without your aid; for there is no distance of places which can hinder me from obeying you.  I conjure you, my best Father, to have some little consideration of us who are in the Indies, and who are your children.  I conjure you, I say, to send hither some holy man, whose fervour may excite our lazy faintness.  I hope, for the rest, that as you know the bottom of our souls, by an illumination from heaven, you will not be wanting to supply us with the means of awakening our languishing and drowsy virtue, and of inspiring us with the love of true perfection.”  In another of his letters, which is thus superscribed, “To Ignatius, my holy Father in Jesus Christ,” he sends him word, that the letter which he received from his holy charity, at his return from Japan, had replenished him with joy; and that particularly he was most tenderly affected with the last words of it:  “I am all yours, yours even to that degree, that it is impossible for me to forget you, Ignatius.”  “When I had read those words,” said he, “the tears came flowing into my eyes, and gushing out of them; which makes me, that I cannot forbear writing them, and recalling to my memory that sincere and holy friendship which you always had, and still have, for me; nothing doubting, but that if God has delivered me from so many dangers, it has principally proceeded from your fatherly intercessions for me.”  He calls himself his son in all his letters, and thus subscribes himself in one:  “The least of your children, and most distant from you, Francis Xavier.”  But the high ideas which Francis had of Ignatius, caused him frequently to ask his advice in relation to his own conduct.  “You will do a charitable work,” said he, “in writing to me a letter, full of spiritual instructions, as a legacy bequeathed to one who is the least of all your children, at the farthest distance from you, and who is as it were banished from your presence, by which I may partake some part of those abundant treasures which heaven has heaped upon you.  I beseech you not to be too niggardly in the accomplishment of my desires.”  “I conjure you,” says he elsewhere, “by the tender love of Jesus Christ, to give me the method which I ought to keep, in admitting those who are to be members of our Society; and write to me at large, considering the smallness of my talent, which is well known to you; for if you give me not your assistance, the poor ability which I have in these matters, will be the occasion of my losing many opportunities for the augmentation of God’s glory.”

In prescribing any thing that was difficult to his inferiors, he frequently intermixed the name of Ignatius:  “I pray you by our Lord, and by Ignatius, the Father of our Society.  I conjure you by the obedience, and by the love which you owe to our Father Ignatius.”  “Remember,” said he farther, “to what degree, both great and small, respect our Father Ignatius.”