Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/113

Rh sic," which, if not written by Hung himself, at least has his imprimatur, leads us to doubt whether even the leader understood monotheism in the Christian sense. The passage described Hung's ascent to heaven after his first encounter with the king of Hades:

God is pictured in that poem as having a divine consort, and the celestial elder brother, who is Jesus, also has a wife. The monotheistic God of the former quotation has thus come to be a heavenly Father with wife and son and daughter-in-law. One's impression is that, unskilled as Hung was in the subtleties of Western theology, he has interpreted the Christian doctrine of the Trinity in a tritheistic sense, grasping, however, the idea that the three persons of the Trinity are members of the same family, the other two being subordinate to the Father just as members of a Chinese family are to its head. It is against the usurpation of God's place by false spirits and the images representing them that Hung and his followers did battle. The implication that there were other celestial beings is latent in the idea that God is