Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/137

Rh was blasphemous, and not a little that could be traced to the mores of a primitive people. But from the standpoint of their desire to open the country to intercourse with the West there was one great advantage — these people had courageously attacked the falsehoods and errors they believed to lurk in their Chinese religions and were brave enough to adopt the foreign Bible as far as they understood it. Under them foreigners might hope for greater progress and more favorable treatment than under the hopelessly conservative Manchu court and the Confucian gentry who supported it.

From the point of view of the native culture, on the other hand, there was never a moment's question that the mongrel religion of Hung was not Chinese. The natives accordingly spurned it with indignation. But apart from some of the leaders, who of sincerity or as a means of control emphasised the new religion, the people at large can have had very little understanding of any of the deeper matters of this faith. The heavy penalties for failure to learn the commandments by heart and for failure to attend the services indicate that the religion was practically forced on the people against their will. When such men as T'ienteh and the Chungwang were caught and wrote their confessions they do not appear to have exhibited any interest in the religion, but rather in the political objects of the enterprise — even the Chungwang who gave his horse to the young T'ienwang when the city of Nanking fell to the imperialists. If these men were more or less guilty of holding their religion lightly — though in the company of those who left Kiangsi there must have been hundreds of the humbler followers who did have sincere religious aspirations — what about the nation at large?

Could they have seen anything worthy of emulation in the religious absurdities of Hung and his followers or in