Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/114

94 married and Jesus also, for Chinese practice requires the marrying of a person having a certain name into a family of a different name. Heaven must, therefore, have had other families, inferior to God's but sufficiently high to furnish consorts to the supreme divine family.

As regards the scheme of salvation and the work of Jesus in the world, there is a passage in "The Trimetrical Classic" which almost exactly paraphrases the words of John 3:16:

If we search through the odes, essays, and proclamations referred to as our sources, we may discover other references of the same kind showing some acquaintance with the Scriptures of the West. But there is little evidence that Hung and his followers comprehended the inner teachings of Christianity. The spiritual virtues of humility, charity, purity of heart, forgiveness, and yearning for fellowship with God and Christ, are wanting altogether or have been transformed into a Confucian interpretation of virtue in terms of right conduct. The vices and evils of the age are attacked and the great virtues