JOURNEY OF BENEDICT GOES.
Xavier of Navarre, nephew of the great Francis, and his comrades were Goes and the priest Emanuel Pinner, also a Portuguese. They proceeded first to CAMBAY, where they were well received by Sultan Murad, Akbar's second son, and provided with carriage and money for their journey to LAHORE, where the Padshah then held his court. Travelling with a Kafila by AHMEDABAD and PATTAN, and then across the great Indian Desert, they reached Lahore on the 5th May, 1595, and were made most welcome by Akbar, who at the same time gladdened their hearts by his display of reverence to images of the Saviour and the Virgin Mary, the gift of a former missionary at his court.
Goes appears to have acquired the esteem of the king in . an especial degree, and with Xavier accompanied him on his summer journey to Kashmir. One Christmas too, we are told, Goes constructed a model of the manger and stable of Bethlehem, after the fashion still kept up in Southern Europe, whilst some of the pupils of the mission acted a Pastoral Eclogue in the Persian tongue on the subject of the Nativity, things that greatly pleased both Musulmans and Hindus, but especially the latter.
Whilst the Court was still at Lahore (which Akbar quitted for Agra in 1598) the circumstance occurred which turned the attention of Jerome Xavier to the long-lost Cathay (as he fancied it), and excited his imagination in the manner already alluded to. This circumstance is thus related by Jarric :-
" One day as Xavier was at the palace and engaged with the
afterwards, in 1590, Akbar's thoughts again turned to Christianity, and at this time, according to the statement of the Jesuits (I know not how far well founded), he ordered a general destruction of mosques and minarets, and forbade circumcision before the fifteenth year. He again applied for instructors, and in 1591 three brethren were sent to Lahore, but after a while, seeing no hope of good, they returned to Goa. Hence on this third occasion the mission was despatched without any great alacrity or sanguine expectations. It is probable that Akbar had arrived at no decided convictions in religion, excepting as to the rejection of Mahomedanism. He seems to have projected a new eclectic kind of Theism, in which adoration was to be addressed to the sun, as an emblem of the Creator. At the same time he never seems to have lost a certain hankering after Christianity, or ceased to display an affectionate reverence for the Christian emblems which he had received from his Jesuit teachers.
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