issued a decree forbidding missionaries of any order or institute to do either of those things, until the Holy See gave a contrary order."[119] Thus, whatsoever other popes may have done or omitted to do, Innocent X solemnly decreed that the Jesuit practices were wrong and would be no longer tolerated by the Church. He had not then learned--what became perfectly apparent to many of his successors--that the Jesuits were as familiar with the various methods of brushing papal decrees out of their way as they were with the frauds and hypocrisies by which they duped and misled the heathen at the expense of the Christian cause. There seems to have been some unnecessary delay, and possibly some undue prevarication, in the manner in which the popes disposed of these troublesome matters. De Montor represents that several of the popes who succeeded Innocent X permitted the Jesuits to continue their idolatrous ceremonies; to wit, Alexander VII, Clement IX, Clement X, Innocent XI, Alexander VIII, and Innocent XII. This general statement, however, is misleading, and calculated to do injustice to these popes, unless taken in connection with the fact that none of them went further than to say that the Jesuits might unite with the Chinese in their _civil_ ceremonies, when they were, in no sense, religious. None of them undertook to decide whether the sacrifice to Confucius did or did not involve religious worship; for that was the question directly submitted to them, and with regard to which the utmost pains were taken to procure accurate and reliable evidence. But it is undoubtedly true that the Jesuits misconstrued what had been done by these six popes, and perverted their meaning to suit themselves, by continuing their idolatrous practices with increased impunity. And they did this to such an extent, and so openly, that in 1693, Maigrot, Apostolic Vicar, Doctor of the Sorbonne, and Bishop of Conon, was constrained, as the representative of the Church, to forbid the idolatrous ceremonies of the Jesuits by a special prohibitory decree. The date of this decree is important, inasmuch as it shows how many years it took and how hard it was to bring the Jesuits into subordination to the Church; in other words, how little they cared for the Church, or the popes, or vicars apostolic, or the ancient monkish orders, when either of them alone, or all combined, ventured to place the least impediment in their path. The question with regard to the idolatrous practices of Nobili arose first in 1618, and was submitted to Paul V in 1621. Hence, up to the time of his official decree of condemnation by Maigrot, as vicar apostolic, seventy-two years--nearly three-quarters of a century--had elapsed, during all which time the Jesuits had enjoyed an uninterrupted triumph over the Church, the popes, and Christianity.