Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/138

118 the confident claims to divinity? What they saw was not a pure religion but the attempt of a group of low-born peasants and laborers to seize the throne by calling superstition to their aid. Revolutionary societies had before this used religious creeds as a pretext. The whole Taiping movement appeared to the nation at large as a gross mockery on its religious side, particularly discredited in the assumption of the divine sanction for actions abhorred by society, and in the application of the death penalty for so many offences. They considered it at best a cruel religion. Its frontal attack on the popular beliefs and coldness towards the Confucian teachings, which formed the religion of the scholars, alienated those masses and leaders whose adherence was necessary to the cause.

In the first march upon Nanking they seemed to discern something more than this — they saw something masterful in the well-drilled army behind the uprising, something that might deliver the land from alien Manchu domination. But when the wave had spent its first strength and the contest settled down to a series of raids without much apparent motive or purpose except plunder, while the T'ienwang remained in the depths of his palace in Nanking, apparently interested in little but his religious fantasies, the hostility of the nation rose and forces gathered that eventually swept the rebels away.