But the Malabar rites, and Chinese rites, and Jesuit-Brahmans were now, as we saw, a scourge in the hands of the Society's critics in Europe, and the Papacy was forced to suppress them. As we have so often realised, the Jesuit repute for broad sagacity and statesmanship, as distinct from astuteness and capacity for intrigue, is without foundation. The Roman Jesuit authorities could have destroyed the system in a year, yet they sustained it for a hundred years, and, with blind stubbornness, allowed an indelible stain to be fixed on the Society, and were responsible for the sudden collapse of their missions. When Benedict XIV. fearlessly and peremptorily condemned them, there was a formidable reaction among their converts, and the hundreds of congregations rapidly disappeared. Their apologist would have us believe that they submitted in 1741 (the year before Benedict's first bull), but that "distance and the difficulty of communication retarded the arrival of their letters at Rome." Ignoring the foolish remark about the difficulty of communication, we may observe that the year 1741 was seventeen years after their official condemnation by the Pope's representative; that Clement XII. had condemned them in 1734 and 1739, and they had ignored his decrees; and that, so far from having submitted in 1741, Benedict XIV. found them contumacious to his bull of 1742, and had to issue another in 1744. They submitted in 1745, and the structure they had raised by two hundred years of devotion and dissimulation rapidly decayed. The missions in other parts of Asia had little success. Ceylon was invaded by two fathers in 1616, but when these were executed in 1627 and 1628 the mission seems to have been abandoned. It is interesting to find that they even entered the almost impregnable capital of Thibet. Two of their more devoted and austere missionaries crossed the vale of Cachmire and the bleak mountains on foot, and reached Lhasa. The expedition had no result, and was not repeated. In nearer Asia also the work was only moderately successful. Armed with diplomatic papers from the French court, instead of the crucifix of which they sometimes boast as their only weapon, they entered the dominion of the Turk, and wrangled with Greeks, Nestorians, Armenians, and other Christians over the infallibility of the Pope. They founded residences at Thessalonica, Smyrna, Trebezon, Damascus, etc., and pushed on to the banks of the Euphrates. In 1682, two Jesuits, magnificently equipped and loaded with presents, approached the Shah of Persia as envoys of Louis XIV., and received permission to preach the Christian gospel. Within a quarter of a century they had, they said, baptized 200,000 of the natives. Then the Persian ruler turned a hostile eye on the growing body, and it melted more rapidly than it had grown. The age of Louis XIV. was over, the French dream of expansion laid aside, and the flow of French money interrupted.