In examining the proportion of Christianity and of Chinese ideas in the new faith, we must remind ourselves that prior to his illness Hung appears never to have heard of the new religion brought to China by the pioneer missionaries, who under great difficulties had carried on their work in Canton and Macao. Or if he had by chance heard of it he certainly could have had no adequate understanding of its teachings. His preparation for the examinations, and the teaching he did in the village schools after his failure, meant familiarity with the Confucian classics. In the absence of other instructors we must assume that he would interpret whatever the new books had to say, if there was any point of doubt or misunderstanding, in the light of the ancient Chinese writings.
We have already learned that in 1836, while attending the examinations at Canton, Hung received a set of tracts, which, we are told, he did not examine for several years.[1] The next year his great visions came to him during a protracted illness. Nevertheless, for some unexplained reason, it was not until 1843, and purely by accident, that he studied the tracts and understood the meaning of the trances. Once his attention was directed to the books, however, they impressed him deeply, as we may see from his essays composed in 1845 and 1846. It is not possible for us to follow the development of his thought, because we have his earlier writings only in the form in which they appeared when published at Nanking, included in the pamphlets brought from that place by the Hermes in 1853. The earlier compositions were "An Ode of the Hundred Correct Things," "An Essay on the Origin of Virtue for the Awakening of the Age," "Further Exhortations for the Awakening of the Age," "Alter the Corrupt and Turn to the Correct."[2] Three of these, to-
- ↑ See chapter II.
- ↑ Hamberg, p. 29.
