It can not then be claimed that Bouhours had the advantage of any new witnesses, nor could he have had anything new in the way of contemporary writings; for, as we have seen, the missionaries of Xavier's time wrote nothing regarding his miracles, and certainly the ignorant natives of India and Japan did not commit any account of his miracles to writing.

Nevertheless, the miracles of healing given in Bouhours were more numerous and brilliant than ever.
But there was far more than this.

Although during the lifetime of Xavier there is neither in his own writings nor in any contemporary account any assertion of a resurrection from the dead wrought by him, we find that shortly after his death stories of such resurrections began to appear.
A simple statement of the growth of these may throw some light on the evolution of miraculous accounts generally.

At first it was affirmed that some people at Cape Comorin said that he had raised one person; then it was said that there were two persons; then in various authors--Emanuel Acosta, in his commentaries written as an afterthought nearly twenty years after Xavier's death, De Quadros, and others--the story wavers between one and two cases; finally, in the time of Tursellinus, four cases had been developed.

In 1622, at the canonization proceedings, three were mentioned; but by the time of Father Bouhours there were fourteen--all raised from the dead by Xavier himself during his lifetime--and the name, place, and circumstances are given with much detail in each case.( 294) (294) The writer in the Catholic World, already referred to, has based an attack here upon a misconception--I will not call it a deliberate misrepresentation--of his own by stating that these resurrections occurred after Xavier's death, and were due to his intercession or the use of his relics.