Page:The Truth about China and Japan - Weale - 1919.djvu/47

 Mings disappeared, the Jesuit Fathers were so firmly entrenched and had so many thousands of converts that they were fully accepted by the new dynasty—just as the Greek Patriarchate was accepted by the Turks after the conquest of Constantinople. It was a question of national discipline, ancestor-worship, which finally brought conflict, the rival monastic orders of the Franciscans and the Dominicans refusing to accept the complaisance of the Jesuits and calling the practice idolatry. The matter was referred to the Popes and there were conflicting rulings. In the year 1700 the great emperor Kang Hsi definitely proclaimed that "the customs of China are political"—meaning that ancestor-worship was part of the national discipline and must be maintained; and although the Popes dissented and hurled anathemas at all who tolerated the practice, it was not until 1724—that is, after a century and a half of close religious intercourse—that an edict of expulsion was issued in Peking and only partially obeyed. The early nineteenth century indeed found Catholic missionaries still working in China in secret, and they were the first Europeans to penetrate Korea. They were indeed part and parcel of the external forces which were forcing open China, and