The influence of Yung Ching on the development of the important foreign question arrested the ambition and sanguine flight of the imagination of the Roman Catholic missionaries, who, rendered overconfident by their success under Kanghi, believed that they held the future of China in their own hands, and that persistency alone was needed to secure the adhesion of that country to the Christian Church. Yung Ching dispelled these illusions, and so far as they were illusions, which nearly two subsequent centuries have proved them to be, it was well that they should be so dispelled. He asserted himself in very unequivocal terms as an emperor of China, and as resolute in maintaining his sovereign position outside the control of any religious potentate or creed. The progress of the Christian religion of the Roman Catholic Church in China was quite incompatible with the supposed celestial origin of the emperor, who was alleged to receive his authority direct from Heaven. It is not surprising that Yung Ching, at the earliest possible moment, decided to blight these hopes, and to assert the natural and inherited prerogative of a Chinese emperor. There is no room to doubt that the Catholic priests had drawn a too hasty and too favorable deduction from the favor of Kanghi. They confounded their practical utility with the intrinsic merit and persuasive force of Christianity. An enlightened ruler had recognized the former, but a skeptical people showed themselves singularly obdurate to the latter. The persecution of the Christians, of which the letters from the missionaries at Pekin at this time are so full, did not go beyond the placing of some restraint on the preaching of their religion. No wholesale executions or sweeping decrees passed against their persons attended its course or marked its development. Yung Ching simply showed by his conduct that they must count no longer on the favor of the emperor in the carrying out of their designs. The difficulties inherent in the task they had undertaken stood for the first time fully revealed, and having been denounced as a source of possible danger to the stability of the empire, they became an object of suspicion even to those who had sympathized with them personally, if not with their creed.