We shall now resume our narrative about the Malabar rites, and endeavour to bring it to a speedy conclusion; the facts which we have already reported being more than sufficient to give a very clear idea of the religious teaching of the Jesuits in India, and of their deportment there. Clement XI., in 1719; Benedict XIII., in 1727; Clement XII., in 1734 and 1739, published briefs upon briefs to oblige the Jesuits to submit to the decree of Cardinal de Tournon, but in vain. The Jesuits either refused or eluded obedience to them. And when Clement XII., in 1739, forced them to take a very stringent oath[110] to obey the decree, every Jesuit took it, but no one observed it; finding a specious excuse for not doing so in that doctrine of theirs, then in full force, which declares that “the man who makes an oath with his mouth, without the consent of his mind, is not obliged to keep the oath, because he had not sworn, but only jested.” At last Benedict XIV. resolved to put an end to the contest, by publishing, in 1741, a terrible bull, in which he calls the Jesuits disobedient, contumacious, crafty, and reprobate men (_inobedientes, contumaces, captiosi, et perditi homines_), and in which he made such stringent and undoubted provisions, that it was a difficult matter to evade obeying it; and especially after the Pope, by another brief in the following year, commanded that the brief of 1741 be read every Sabbath-day in all the houses, churches, and colleges of the Society. The influence of the Jesuits in India now began to decline rapidly. Their Saniassi were discovered to be impostors. The war that began shortly after between France and England caused still greater damage; and when their order was abolished in 1773, the Jesuits had little or no influence in India.—These are the principal features of the missions in India, properly so called. In Japan, that turbulent and warlike country, the Jesuits adopted a different and more appropriate method to acquire influence among the people. Throwing away somewhat of their cunning and pretended sanctity, they espoused the cause of one or other of the various parties who were disputing for power, were cherished, respected, and permitted to preach their religion, if the party they sided with were triumphant; persecuted, exiled, and put to death if it were vanquished. The hundreds of Jesuits who are represented to us as having perished martyrs for their faith were oftener executed as unsuccessful conspirators. The Japanese were not so bigoted a race as the Indians, and the Bonzes, their priests, were not all-powerful like the Brahmins. The persecutions they exercised against their dangerous rivals, the Jesuits, could not be successful but when the people and the sovereign were offended against them, not as missionaries, but as defeated malcontents and conspirators. The Jesuits maintained their ground in Japan with various vicissitudes, till they were suppressed.