Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/388

Rh motive for this uprising that I have little doubt that he and Fêng — working together on the basis of Hung's supposed revelations from God — organised and planned the revolution, and that only the circumstances of his capture and the death of Fêng soon after brought it into the control of the fanatical elements whose incapacity for rule and whose emphasis of their fantastic religious views proved eventually the undoing of their cause. What might have been a national movement thus became a sectarian outburst which alienated the substantial elements of society, inducing them to support the Manchu Dynasty in preference to so eccentric a group as the Taiping schismatics. It also explains the defection of the Triads who gave their support at first and withdrew from the movement in the very moment when it was bursting forth from the hills of Kwangsi to conquer its way to Nanking. Such a change of front is explicable only on some such theory as that set forth here.

The Western nations were arrested by the news that a Christian state was being set up, that the Taipings accepted the doctrines from across the sea and had even received instruction from missionaries and invited them to come to Nanking. Not long after their conquest of Nanking representatives of three powers went from Shanghai to study their political and religious views. They discovered their political incapacity and learned that their religion, while ostensibly based upon the Bible, interpreted the Christian Scriptures in the light of Confucian and Buddhist ideas. Moreover, with an almost revolting anthropomorphism, they claimed Deity for Hung, the T'ienwang, proclaiming him the second son of God, while Yang, king of the East, asserted that he was the Holy Ghost and Saviour from Disease. They were possessed with a strong spirit of iconoclasm and gave much attention to the teaching of the Ten Commandments and