ABSTRACT

[245/1/2] As soon as I reached Banja I went to Father Diego de la Concepcion, 1 whom I found in bed very weak and ill [246/1] with gout and other ailments due to sixty-nine years of age, of which this servant of God had spent fifty-one as a friar and twenty-eight as a missionary in the Kingdoms of Bengal. During these years he had done great service to God our Lord, and when he was, more than once, elected as Diffinidor 1 and Visitor of the India Congregation, he refused these honours, as being a devoted cultivator of our Lord’s vineyard with no wish to let go his hold upon the Evangelical Plough, with which he was tilling, as a diligent labourer, the hard and stubborn soil of those idolatrous souls. Thus by his persistent teaching and strenuous work strong roots were struck in those now softened hearts, which later on brought forth flowering shoots, and so bore, in due season, fine, well-grown bunches of good deeds and virtuous lives to the glory of their divine Creator.