Page:Tseng Kuo Fan and the Taiping Rebellion.djvu/117

This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.
RELIGION OF THE TAIPINGS
97

For he changed the name of Shang-te [God]
Into that of Yuh-hwang [the pearly emperor].
But the great God
Is the supreme Lord
Over all the world,
The great Father in heaven.
His name is most honorable,
To be handed down through distant ages;
Who was this Hwuy
That he dared alter it?
It was meet that this same Hwuy
Should be taken by the Tartars;
And together with his son
Perish in the northern desert.
From Hwuy, of the Sung dynasty,
Up to the present day,
For these seven hundred years,
Men have sunk deeper and deeper in error.

With the doctrine of God
They have not been acquainted;
While the King of Hades
Has deluded them to the uttermost.

Having earlier in this same poem outlined the Biblical story of the creation and the revelation of God to the Israelites, His compassion and power in the deliverance from Egypt and the Red Sea, His care for them in the wilderness, the promulgation of the Ten Commandments, and finally, when they had wandered from the right way, the sending of His first-born son to deliver them from their evil, Hung now goes on to claim his place in the divine plan, which is that he also has been commissioned to bring knowledge of God into the world, to do the same work for China that Jesus did for the West in bringing the people back to the worship of the great and supreme God whom once they followed.