religious rite. He probably foresaw, as indeed time has shown, that ancestral worship would prove to be an insuperable obstacle to many inquirers, if they were called upon to discard it once and for all; at the same time, he must have known that an invocation to spirits, coupled with the hope of obtaining some benefit therefrom, is worship pure and simple, and cannot be explained away as an unmeaning ceremony.
Against the Jesuits in this matter were arrayed the Dominicans and Franciscans; and the two parties fought the question before several Popes, sometimes one side carrying its point, and sometimes the other. At length, in 1698, a fresh petition was forwarded by the Jesuit order in China, asking the Pope to sanction the practice of this rite by native Christians, and also praying that the Chinese language might be used in the celebration of mass. Kʽang Hsi supported the Jesuits in the view that ancestral worship was a harmless ceremony; but after much wrangling, and the dispatch of a Legate to the Manchu court, the Pope decided against the Jesuits and their Imperial ally. This was too much for the pride of Kʽang Hsi, and he forthwith declared that in future he would only allow facilities for preaching to those priests who shared his view. In 1716, an edict was issued, banishing all missionaries unless excepted as above. The Emperor had indeed been
