CHAPTER XIX.

CHRISTIANITY AND PROSPECTS OF THE TAE PINGS.

OUR means of ascertaining the religious and moral tenets of the Tae pings consist almost altogether in the examination of their own publications, all of which are of pamphlet size; and of one or two short official documents addressed to the western foreigners who visited them at Nanking.

Their publications are divisible into three classes :

I. Those emanating from Hung sew tseuen himself, assisted probably by some of the earliest and most devout of the Godworshippers. One or two of the books of this class were certainly published before the movement became political, and they all of them, the latest included, say little or nothing of the political objects of the Tae pings. They may be called Hung sew tseuen's propagandist or missionary publications; and if we except allusions to the visions which he had in his twenty-fourth year, and which subsequently formed the authority for his mission, they contain nothing whatever of a new revelation. They are founded on the earlier Protestant translations of the Old and New Testaments, as understood by him. The translation of the two Testaments which the Tae pings are now printing unaltered in Nanking falls within this class of their publications.

II. Those publications which dwell on the new alleged revelations from God or Christ; and which record Their alleged descents into the world. All these necessarily emanate from Yang sew tsing and Seaou chaou hwuy, the Eastern and

Western Princes; and several run in the names of these two personages. The purpose of this class is evidently to further the political and military objects of the Tae pings, by working on man's religious feelings. The documents addressed to Occidentals who visited Nanking belong to it, as emanating from the Eastern Prince or his party.

III. Those publications which are altogether political, as army and court regulations, &c. &c.

The third class is unmistakeably constituted a distinct class by the contents alone of the publications which it comprises. The information which they convey has been sufficiently employed in the compilation of former Chapters, and they need not, therefore, be dwelt on here.

A careful consideration of the contents of the first two classes gives great reason to conclude, that that gradual withdrawal on the part of Hung sew tseuen, the Heavenly Prince, from the guidance of the temporal affairs of the Tae pings, which we found completed when we first met them at Nanking, must have been caused by his dissatisfaction with the turn affairs took in consequence of the ecstatical revelations of the Eastern and Western Princes-more especially those of the former. From the day on which the Godworshippers rose in arms, about the end of 1850, the Eastern Prince. played a prominent part in their military affairs; and about the middle or end of 1852, Hung sew tseuen appears to have resigned them entirely to his guidance, occupying himself since that time exclusively with the propagation of his religious views. From the publications of the second class we observe, on the other hand, that the pretensions of the Eastern Prince have been gradually increasing. On the occasion of the latest Occidental visits in the summer of 1854, Hung sew tseuen was still spoken of, in all writings proceeding from the Eastern Prince, with the greatest respect; but there are good grounds for believing that the latter is only deterred from making himself the nominal, as he undoubtedly is the virtual head, by the certainty first, that such a step would engage

him in a physical fight with an earnest section of the earlier Godworshippers who under the present arrangement still lend him their aid; and secondly, that the deposal of the "second son of God" could not fail to destroy, in the minds of the people generally, the mental basis of the whole movement.

Some such question as the following has very frequently been put to me: "How is it about the religion of these rebels? Are they or are they not Christians?" And I have found that I could most speedily put the matter in the right light by rejoining with another question: "What kind of Christians do you mean? Do you mean Romanist Christians, or Lutheran Christians, or Nestorian Christians, or Calvinist Christians, or Armenian Christians, or Abysinnian Christians, or Coptic Christians, or Greek Christians ?"

That in one nation, which at one period had only one way of viewing Christianity, widely different sects will certainly arise in the course of time is a, or rather is the great fact proved by the history of Christian churches. And, as we have seen that Christianity certainly has, in the past 1,800 years of its existence, been invariably much modified by the different pre-existing systems of fundamental beliefs entertained by the different nations which have accepted it hitherto; so we ought to infer that it will continue to be modified by the pre-existing beliefs of the nations which accept it in future. Even illiterate tribes, with their few and vague convictions, will, while accepting the whole of the phraseology of that kind of Christianity which is preached to them, attach to that phraseology a meaning somewhat different from the sense which it has for the preachers. That a number of adult converts of a nation like the Chinese, which has so long entertained, and is so thoroughly imbued with, a peculiar set of fundamental beliefs, would, with or without express intention, considerably modify the Christianity which had attracted them was not simply probable, it was, humanly speaking, a certainty.

The Christianity of Hung sew tseuen and the better educated of the Godworshippers, as exhibited in what I have called

the publications of the first class, is the product of an unassisted consideration of more or less inaccurate translations of the Old and New Testaments, by men who had, up to the age of full manhood, devoted themselves to the study of the Chinese Sacred Books, and who more or less firmly believed that those fundamental views, which have been expounded in my last Chapter, truly pictured the origin and nature of the universe, and constituted the bases of the only true psychology and morality.

Hung sew tseuen was thirty years of age, when he began to study those Christian missionary tracts which he had cursorily looked at some few years before; and from his childhood he had been a professional student of orthodox Confucianism. When he embraced Christianity, he did so without reserve; but it is next to certain, that neither he nor Fung yun shan would have been morally and intellectually able to embrace it at all, if they could have supposed that it required them to repudiate, as something either irrational or immoral, several of the more important tenets of Confucianism,-tenets that had hitherto constituted their deepest mental life. Mr. Hamberg's book, together with those of the Tae ping publications which professedly emanate from the pen of the Heavenly Prince himself, place it beyond a doubt, that Hung sew tseuen is a man of strong religious feelings,—a man who must, at all times, have strongly felt the craving of humanity to reverence a higher Being, and its longing for an immortal existence. As such, he could have little natural sympathy for the atheistical interpretation of Shang te, the Supreme Ruler, and Teen, Heaven, which the good faith and unrivalled genius of Choo tsze had imposed on the nation; and hence he must be placed with those whom I have described as inclining to the most deistical interpretation of the Sacred Books, that orthodoxy permitted. The words, Te and Teen, formed the hinge on which he turned from Confucianism to Christianity. He had always reverenced the Being indicated by these terms, as the Supreme Ruler of

the world; and from Leang afah's missionary tracts, he learnt that, in the most ancient and most venerated Books of the western foreigners, that very Being was not simply mentioned a few times, as in the Chinese Sacred Books, but formed their chief subject, as the Creator and Ruler of the Universe, with the attribute of distinct personality. And, when he got these books himself, he found that, while Shang te was indeed every where referred to under that very name as the One Almighty Ruler, a greater personality was therein given to his other name, Teen, by the addition of Foo, father; which latter word, it will be remembered, awakens peculiarly reverent feelings in the mind of a Chinese. Hence in taking, as he distinctly has done, the Old and New Testaments, as the highest standard of truth, he has not been constrained to discard the Chinese Sacred Books, but merely to view those passages which refer to Shang te and Teen, by the light which is thrown on them by the attributes and acts ascribed, in the foreign Sacred Books, to the Being so named. For the rest, the morality, taught by precept and example in the Chinese Sacred Books, corresponded so completely with that taught by precept and example in the foreign Sacred Books, that in this respect also the acceptance of the latter, as the highest standard, led to no condemnation of the former: on the contrary the two mutually confirmed each other.

The most important of the Tae ping publications, for our present purpose, is that entitled "Tae ping Chaou shoo, the Tae ping Book of Declarations or Instructions;" first, because it is avowedly the work of Hung sew tseuen himself; and secondly, because it, being a vindication, addressed to the educated of his countrymen, of the system which he preaches,

-a vindication supported by numerous references to the Chinese sacred and historical literature-really shows us what it was that (in addition to the mental aberration which he manifestly himself believed to have been a real ascent of "his soul" into heaven) produced his own conversion. I may take this opportunity of stating, that this one book completely