Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/122

102 and civilised nations of the earth in regard to this movement, it is now apparent that they neither profess nor apprehend Christianity, and whatever may be the true judgment to form of their political power, it can no longer be doubted that intercourse cannot be established or maintained on terms of equality."

If we have correctly interpreted his writings, Hung's religious views unfolded themselves to him in a form somewhat as follows: "The missionaries from the West are preaching Shangti (God); the supreme God of the ancient Chinese classics was also Shangti. Confucius might have revealed Him more fully to the nation and thus prevented apostasy, but he failed to do so. In later dynasties the rulers forsook Him altogether, going so far as to change His name. In the West, however, Jesus appeared in due time and became the Saviour, through whose sacrifice the nations of the West retained the worship of Shangti. Therefore, we must accept the Scriptures of the West and our own pre-Confucian accounts of Shangti, interpreting the writings in terms of each other. But China is in a hopeless condition; God must interpose again here as he did in the West, and the visions that came to me in 1837 are his call to me to do here what Jesus did for the whole world. God has revealed to me through these visions that I am the full brother of Jesus, the second son of God. Therefore I am in a position to receive and interpret his messages directly; I am one of the Godhead."

Eventually, after congregations were built up on the basis of Hung's divine pretensions, ambitious men like Yang and Hsiao, claiming to be divine oracles, somewhat limited Hung's sacrosanct standing and led the movement into greater extravagances.

Claiming to be of divine parentage, Hung firmly believed that God would care for him and his enterprise.