Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/136

116 the worship of false gods of all sorts. These observances, if faithfully carried out, would secure the favor of God and win heaven. Prayers were prescribed for such occasions as marriages, funerals, thanksgiving after childbirth, and the building of houses. During the great ceremonies of state, sacrifices of animals were probably offered; in every service offerings of tea and rice were prescribed, and in some more important cases animals and wine as well.

In all these books and poems we can see the direct influence of the Western religion, but the interpretations and the ceremonials are chiefly Chinese, Confucian and Buddhist. The foreigners at first had some thought that the Taipings were sincerely attempting to set up the Christian religion, but they were estranged and shocked at the curious claims of the latter to supernatural guidance, in particular the blasphemous pretensions of the T'ienwang and the king of the East. Though they found certain outward forms of worship which they could recognise as similar to the ordinary Protestant ceremonial and though they perceived that pains were taken to give a certain amount of instruction to the rank and file, yet they felt that there was too much that was external on the part of the followers, and too fanatical and transparently hypocritical on the part of the leaders, to allow great expectations of realising the Christian state they had hoped for when the movement arose.

It is true that a few observers believed that the Taipings erred chiefly through ignorance of the truth and through misunderstanding of what the Christian religion was; and they argued that matters would be different later if the latter were given a chance to win the empire and come into free contact with the rest of the world. They understood that the Taiping religion contained much that was wrong, little that was Christian, much that