Following the baptisms, the new Christians return to their homes and come back with their wives and families to be in their turn prepared for baptism… - Francis Xavier

But it was St. Xavier who made anti-Brahminism the central theme of his missionary thrust. “These are,” he wrote, “the most perverse people in the world...they never tell the truth, but think of nothing but how to tell subtle lies and to deceive the simple and ignorant people...the poor simple people do exactly what the Brahmins tell them...If there were no Brahmins in the area, all Hindus would accept conversion to our faith.”

To a considerable extent the shape of Xavier's missionary work was determined by this threefold authority. Personally the most modest of men, his imagination was fired by the progress of Portuguese discovery and by the thought of lands and empires to be brought within the kingdom of Christ. He had not gone out to be the supervisor of a little handful of Jesuits in a small corner of India. His own temperament may have been restless; but there is a certain magnificence in a restlessness which led him to contain within a single glance India and the Moluccas, Japan, and, even beyond Japan, China.

"Some time now elapsed before any other missionary attempted to show himself. The Brahmins, however, did not by airy means improve their position by their strenuous resistance, but, on the contrary, made it worse, for Francis Xavior took occassion on this account to institute in Goa a religious tribunal, after the pattern of the Spanish Inquisition, over which he ruled without opposition, and being aided by the Portuguese arms, he proceeded, with the most frightful saverity, against all those who offered any hinderance to the spread of Christianity, or who also dared to take, the baptised natives back again to their old idol-worship. In this way, then, innumerable Brahmins, and more particularly "the richest among them lost their lives by the executioner’s hands, or, at least, were expelled from their country in order that their property might be seized for the benefit of the society As a matter of course, the effeminate Hindus now pressed forword to have themselves baptised, ‘rather than make acquaintance with the prisons of the Inquisition, or run the risk of being roasted alive over a slow fire !. . . ."the consequence was that Jesuit colleges sprang up in all suitable places, being enriched by the property of the slaughtered and banished heretics. And still more numerous were the churches which were erected, as they no longer hesitated to destroy, with fire and sword, all the heathen temples which they were able to get at, and, indeed, it almost seemed as if the Jesuits had taken for their example the cruel conduct of Charles the great against the Saxons.*" (page 92)