that the Christian faith, which he had planted in divers kingdoms of the
East, should one day flourish there again; which very prediction he left
graven on a pillar of living stone, for the memory of future ages. The
pillar was not far distant from the walls of Meliapore, the metropolis of
the kingdom of Coromandel; and it was to be read in the characters of the
country, that when the sea, which was forty miles distant from the
pillar, should come up to the foot of it, there should arrive in the
Indies white men and foreigners, who should there restore the true
religion.

The infidels had laughed at this prediction for a long time, not
believing that it would ever be accomplished, and indeed looking on it as
a kind of impossibility that it should; yet it was accomplished, and that
so justly, that when Don Vasco de Gama set foot on the Indies, the sea,
which sometimes usurps upon the continent, and gains by little and little
on the dry land, was by that time risen to the pillar, so as to bathe its
lower parts.

Yet it may be truly said, that the prophecy of St Thomas had not its full
effect, till after the coming of Father Xavier; according to another
prediction of that holy man Peter de Couillan, a religious of the
Trinity, who, going to the Indies with Vasco de Gama, in quality of his
ghostly father, was martyred by the Indians on the seventh of July 1497,
forty-three years before the beginning of the Society of Jesus, who being
pierced through with arrows, while he was shedding his blood for Christ,
distinctly pronounced these following words: "In few years there shall be
born in the church of God, a new religious order of clergymen, which
shall bear the name of Jesus: and one of its first fathers, conducted by
the Spirit of God, shall pass into the most remote countries of the East
Indies, the greatest part of which shall embrace the orthodox faith,