village. The greatest part of the inhabitants were baptized; but there
remained in them only a confused notion of their baptism; and their
religion was nothing more than a mingle of Mahometanism and idolatry.

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.