This situation lasted until 1743, when Benedict XIV. at last vindicated the dignity of the Papacy and issued his famous bull _Ex quo singulari_. A second and more drastic bull, sternly condemning their contumacy, appeared in 1744, and they were now forced to submit without reserve. From that time the Chinese mission melted away. As far as the Jesuits were concerned, it had never had any religious solidity. A few Jesuits who attempted to sustain the converts in the provinces were put to death, and the court Jesuits were restricted to their hydraulic engineering, surgery, philology, and astrology. They lingered for a generation at Peking, the strangest figures in the whole clerical universe, but the Chinese showed no sign of relenting, and they died, one by one, in their singular employments. Their death closed the stirring but sterile episode of the first attempt to Christianise China. Before we turn to India, the next important centre of Christianity in the far east, we must glance at their fortunes in subsidiary missions. Their letters tell how they entered the Philippine Islands in 1665, and had a miraculous success among the very lowly, but generally peaceful, natives; one Jesuit is said to have baptized 50,000 of them (mostly children, apparently) in four years, and founded eight churches and three colleges. One priest to eight churches, and eight churches to 50,000 converts, give us the true measure of their success. They were generally content to pour the baptismal water over the heads of all who could be induced to accept it, by material benefits or a confused belief in its magical properties, and send the inflated statistics to Europe. In spite, however, of wars amongst the natives and occasional persecution they built up a prosperous mission. Its story is tainted by commercial activity and unprincipled behaviour towards the rest of the clergy. We shall see later that they had vast estates in California and Mexico, and from these they conducted a large and regular traffic, in their own ships, with Manila. Archbishop Pardo, of Manila, condemned this traffic, and ordered them to distribute the value of their property among the poor. He suffered the customary fate of prelates who interfered with the operations of the Society. Whether the governor of the Philippines was bribed, or merely persuaded by the fathers, we need not attempt to determine; but his officers seized the Archbishop during the night and deported him to a neighbouring island. Thirty years previously Pardo's predecessor, Archbishop Guerrero, had been treated with the same outrages.