Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/337

314 to the foundations of the burnt church and carefully examined and found that these underground rooms are only to prevent dampness and furnish storerooms for coal and have no other use. But the people of T'ientsin, not having seen for themselves, but merely having heard that there were these underground rooms, were much excited at the reports that young children were shut up in their dark recesses, especially since [the work] did not pass through the hands of local workmen.

A second cause for doubt arises from the fact that there are Chinese who have come to the Hall of Benevolence to be cured of diseases, who have remained for a long while and cannot be induced to come out again. Such a ease occurred when the daughter of a former magistrate of the Tsinhsien district, Kiangsi, Wei Hei-chen, Mrs. Ho [née Wei], brought her daughter into the Hall for treatment. And when she did not return after a long time her father went to the Hall and gently besought her to come home, but she was stubbornly unwilling to do so. It was therefore declared that they had a medicine which magically destroyed her original nature.

The third cause of doubt is due to the fact that the Hall of Benevolence, when it receives and keeps children who have no support, though they are beggars and poverty-stricken folk, receives all those who are dangerously ill and about to die into their faith. There is also the report about baptism. Baptism means that when they die the priest takes water and places it on their foreheads and seals their eyes, saying that they can ascend to heaven. When the people see that they receive [into the faith] those who are at the point of death, and hear that they themselves wash the eyes of the dead, they are greatly surprised. Again there are wagons and boats that bring people from other places to T'ientsin, fetching sometimes several tens or a hundred persons. The populace seeing these [persons] come in but never go out, cannot understand the reason.

A fourth cause of suspicion is that within the institution the buildings are many and scattered, with different places where scripture is studied, lessons read, hand work done, or the sick healed. Sometimes a child is in a front building and the mother in one at the back, or the mother in the Hall of Benevolence and