It is in 1843, in the summer, that Hong Xiuquan realizes he has the key in his own hand; it has been there all the time for seven years. Enmeshed as he has been in the rhythms of state-sponsored ceremonial, examinations, and family, his dream has stayed fastened in his mind in all its detail, but still without clear explanation. A friend and distant relative named Li Jingfang, in whose family Hong has been teaching, drops by Hong’s house, sees an odd-looking book, and asks for the loan of it, which Hong as casually grants. The book is Liang Afa’s set of nine tracts, “Good Words for Exhorting the Age,” brought home by Hong in 1836, and since then neither read nor thrown away. Li Jingfang reads the tracts with rapt attention. Returning to Hong’s home, he urges that he read it too. Hong does.1
Liang’s tracts fit the lock of Hong’s mind in many ways, for they focus on the source of evil, and the meaning of the good.2 In their strange complexity, they talk to the world within his head and to the world of war that has been swirling around Canton from 1839 to 1842.
It has been a strange and episodic war, fought over trade and money and prestige and opium, a war of threats and counterthreats, of bluster and evasion. The world of the foreign factories by the waterfront has been transformed and the British, driven from the city, have seized Hong Kong in recompense. At first in 1839 the Chinese seemed to have the upper hand. Exasperated by the ever-rising shipments of opium, grown in India under British supervision, they made the British give up all their stockpiles of the drug—20,283 chests in all—each chest containing forty balls of opium, each ball composed of three pounds of the refined opium extract, wrapped in heavy coverings of poppy leaves.3 The Chinese forced this surrender by blockading the foreigners in the thirteen factories on the Canton waterfront, cutting off all river contact with the outside world. Chinese troops lined the streets behind the factories, placed guards in the esplanade, and stationed three cordons of boats on the river, all the way from the Creek to the Danish hong. Every Chinese servant and cook, linguist and comprador, coolie and water carrier—some eight hundred men in all—was ordered to leave his job with the foreigners, or be beheaded. A great silence fell over the normally lively area, as the isolated Western men tried to clean their rooms and sweep the floors, fill their own lamps with oil, polish their silverware, wash their plates, and cook in whatever way they could their stockpiled food, their diet determined by their skills: boiled eggs and potatoes, toasted bread, and rice.4 As for the opium, the Chinese officials spent days disposing of it, mixing it in pots with lime and—after first apologizing to the spirits of the waters—flushing it out to sea. When all the opium was handed over, the British were allowed to leave Canton, and most other foreigners did the same.
But British merchants were affronted, London roused. A fleet and troops were sent, Chinese forts and ships destroyed, treaties agreed at gunpoint, only to be broken, the factories reoccupied by British traders and again abandoned in the face of Chinese rage, and fears of massacre. By May of 1841 the shifting tides of war had sent Chinese crowds surging through the abandoned foreign factories, gutting all that lay between Hog Lane and the Creek, smashing or stealing the mirrors, chandeliers, and marble statues, the weather vanes and clocks, and burning what remained.5 Yet at the self-same moment the war, for the first time in China’s history, brings British troops to the hills above Canton’s walls—not now as isolated strollers or viewers of the fire, but fully armed and uniformed, backed by armored vessels in the river.
The British fleet—led by the British ironclad steamboat Nemesis—sinks over seventy Chinese junks and fireboats, and their guns raze much of the waterfront that has not already been fired by the Chinese themselves. British and Indian sepoy troops, in a daring amphibious maneuver, land from the river north of Canton, march around the city, and seize from the rear the four mountain forts that were meant to guard the city from all assaults. In a triumphant gesture of disdain, the British sailors cut the queues of hair off their Chinese captives, and take the clothes of several. Thus bedecked, in Mandarin robes, Chinese hats on heads, and dangling down their backs the severed queues of jet-black hair, they receive the plaudits of their countrymen.6
As negotiations on the city’s fate continue through sweltering days in May, British and Indian troops patrol the area of Sanyuanli, north of their encampment, on the road that leads to Hua county. There are incidents, clashes: troops march across the paddies full of ripening rice; gates are broken, food is stolen, clothes vanish. There is “foraging” for animals without due payment. Chinese women are accosted, raped. Graves are violated in the name of scientific curiosity—to see whether or how the Chinese embalm their dead. The small bound foot of a woman’s corpse is taken from her coffin. The villagers of Sanyuanli bang gongs, assemble their irregular militiamen, most armed initially with little more than hoes, though some have spears. Other villagers join them from the northwest, and some of these have simple guns. More Chinese villagers come from the north, ten miles nearer Hua, some of them trained for water combat.7
It is scorching hot, the numbers grow: five thousand, seven thousand, seven thousand five hundred. Combat, when it is joined, is chaos, in a sudden swirling rainstorm that ends all visibility, makes swamps of paths and lakes of paddies, soaks muskets so they will not fire, leaves commanders helplessly looking for their troops. The British lines hold firm, although some of their men are literally hooked out of the rain-soaked ranks by Chinese wielding weapons like enormous shepherd’s crooks attached to bamboo poles, and badly wounded. The sepoys dry their sodden muskets with the linings of their turbans, or are issued new muskets with percussion caps, less sensitive to moisture, that let the fire resume. The scattered troops are rounded up and reunited: the toll for the British, one dead and fifteen wounded. Deaths to the Chinese, many but unknown.8
By the end of May 1841, each side feels poised for victory: the British, with their discipline and heavy guns, could blitz or occupy the city; the village militiamen, grown now to almost twenty thousand, from 103 different villages, could overwhelm the British with their numbers and their righteous wrath. Above the heads of both, a deal is struck by diplomatic means: the city will be saved, but pay six million taels in indemnity; the militias will disperse; the British will leave the hills. The prefect of Canton, She Baoshun, makes sure the terms are met. Grudgingly, the Chinese irregulars disperse. But, as they see the British also file away, the city spared, the ill-armed villagers claim a total victory.9
After this settlement, in the examination halls of Canton, the staid environment is filled for a moment in 1841 with flying ink stones, hurled by the enraged scholars at officials they have come to fear and hate. This too is an aspect of the war, one that begins to divide the Chinese against themselves. For as a result of the fighting the belief is growing that the country is full of traitors, Chinese traitors to their race. New kinds of angers flare as the blame for humiliation and defeat is parceled out among the vanquished. To the examination candidates in Canton, as they shout their anger and hurl their only available projectiles, the carved ink stones, often of great beauty and antiquity, that constitute one of the scholars’ “four treasures”—the others being the brushes, brush holders, and the ink itself—the enemy is their chief examiner, the prefect She Baoshun. For in persuading the militiamen at Sanyuanli to disperse, even though he doubtless also saved the city from destruction, he seems to the educated candidates to have gone too far in appeasing the voracious foreigners. When he retreats, mortified, before the barrage, other emboldened students try to smash the sedan chair in which he flees.10
At other times it is the officials themselves who spur the local Canton hunts for traitors, seeking out those who trade with foreigners, translate or teach Chinese, row or sail their boats, or—most heinous crime of all—guide the British officers and their vessels through the ill-charted and shifting mud flats of the creeks along the Pearl River. Some of those accused of such collaboration are punished by means of sharpened wooden sticks thrust through their ears, the ends sticking straight up above their heads and topped with tiny flags, as they are hustled through the streets.11 The militiamen of Sanyuanli and elsewhere kill more than a thousand of their own countrymen as they seek out anyone who collaborated with the British; and the Banner troops of the Qing state, the “regular army” that was of little service in the fray, now roam across the countryside accusing of treason those whose property they covet.12
As the British fleet moves northward, massing by the Yangzi River delta, probing Hangzhou Bay, attacking Shanghai, and finally laying siege to Nanjing, a new element enters the story. For now it is the Manchu officers of the ruling dynasty, fearing subversion from the Chinese in the very cities they seek to defend against the British, who launch preemptive strikes against their own people, killing Chinese on vague treason charges just at the news of the imminent arrival of the British forces. British troops see Chinese people fleeing from their “protectors” in the Manchu Banner armies, and if they force an entry find the streets within filled with Chinese dead. Not surprisingly, as they so swiftly learned to do in Hong Kong when the British seized it as a spoil of war in 1841, these Chinese survivors seem eager to work with the British and thus fan the very basis of suspicion about their loyalties.
The self-reinforcing cycle of myth and fear increases as members of secret societies, bonded by blood oaths and secret passwords, and pledged to eventual overthrow of the alien Manchus and restoration of the long-defeated house of Ming, also flock to areas where the British have control. Though some are double agents, reporting back their findings to the Qing officials, many use the war and its dislocations to engage in piracy, continued opium running, or other rackets under protection of the Union Jack. In other cities it is the Manchus who destroy their own women and children first, before taking their own lives by fire or sword or drowning.13
No Confucian texts, no local histories, no Jade Record, can quite define these strange catastrophes. But in Liang’s first tract, near the middle, a new voice calls out to Hong Xiuquan. It is the voice of a foreign sage or scholar named Isaiah, and this is how Liang records Isaiah’s words:
Why should ye be stricken any more? ye will revolt more and more: the whole heart is sick, and the whole heart faint. From the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores: they have not been closed, neither bound up, neither mollified with ointment. Your country is desolate, your cities are burned with fire: your land, strangers devour it in your presence, and it is desolate, as overthrown by strangers.14
The fire that Isaiah cites has not only scourged the Canton waterfront but has consumed the Chinese warriors in new and terrifying ways. Some have been blown through the air in balls of fire when the rockets of the British ironclad paddle steamers hit the stores of gunpowder in the war junks’ holds, their bodies tumbling back to earth in shattered fragments.15 Wounded Chinese troops have been scorched to death or blown apart as they fall on the gunpowder pouches slung around their waists, ignited by the slow matches for their newly issued matchlocks that they clutch in their inexperienced hands. Others have staggered naked out of their burning clothes as the houses where they were sheltering caught fire or clung to the stern chains or rudders of their burning boats until the ships blew up or the intense heat forced their grip to loosen and they sank beneath the surface of the water.16 Never in the Canton Delta has there been heard a sound like that of February 27, 1841, when the British captured and set fire to the 900-ton ship Chesapeake, just below Whampoa. The Chinese had bought the ship the previous year from the Americans and tried to convert it into a man-of-war, hoisting the red flag of the commanding admiral on its mainmast, decorating the poop and taffrail with colored streamers, and filling it with gunpowder and munitions. When the flames reached the magazine and the ship exploded, the sound could be heard for thirty miles. The ship split through as though severed by a giant saw, the flaming fragments were hurled high into the heavens, and set fire to houses far away.17
Once again, speaking through Liang’s translation, it is the man Isaiah who seems to have foreseen the nightmare, and to have given it his words:
And the destruction of the transgressors and of the sinners shall be together, and they that forsake the LORD shall be consumed. For they shall be ashamed of the oaks which ye have desired, and ye shall be confounded for the gardens that ye have chosen. For ye shall be as an oak whose leaf fadeth, and as a garden that hath no water. And the strong shall be as fibers of hemp, and the maker of it as a spark, and they shall both burn together, and none shall quench them.18
It is on the very first page of his first tract that Liang introduces evil and its begetter. There is a god whose name is Ye-huo-hua, writes Liang, who created earth and all the living things. But of all the things created, the serpent is the most devious, for this serpent is none other than the god of evil, who has transformed himself into a serpent demon. This serpent demon lures a woman into eating a fruit that gives knowledge of evil ways; she in turn feeds it to her husband, for which both are cursed by the god and banished from the garden where they had lived. On the eastern edge of the garden, God places a being called a Cherubim, constantly watchful and grasping a blazing sword, to preserve the source of life and to stop the couple from ever returning to that land of happiness. Liang gives a source for this story, as a scholar should. It is the third chapter of a book he identifies as a “Sacred Text” (shengjing), entitled “The Book of Creation,” chapter 3.19 This is what Liang writes and Hong reads. There is no way for Hong to tell that Liang has added to the Book of Genesis his own explanation that the serpent in Eden is the god of evil, the serpent demon.
Liang repeats the story in the third tract, though this time in a different context. The serpent demon is still defined as being the evil god, but now the god Ye-huo-hua is called “the Highest God of Heaven.” In the second tract, where the serpent demon’s wiles are again discussed, God has yet another name, “Great Ruler of things created on heaven and earth.” It is not until the beginning of the sixth tract that Liang removes what may be lingering doubt by explaining that all these names refer to the same true God.20 But whatever name for God one uses, the extent of the serpent demon’s damage can now be seen in full. For when the first couple lived in their garden there was neither excessive heat nor excessive cold, no need for men to till the soil or women to spin, no floods or droughts, no sicknesses or death. In the beginning, human nature was good, and evil thoughts did not arise. But once the serpent demon spun his plans, evil entered the world, and now the nature of men holds more bad than good, and the numbers of the righteous and the pure of spirit are few indeed.21
On the question of evil, Liang in his second tract thinks aloud an elusive and difficult problem. Since the Lord of Heaven clearly has the power to create all the myriad beings on this earth out of a state of nothingness, if he had wanted to he could have created a different set of beings with living souls. But because he loved his creatures as parents love their children, he sent his only and beloved son down to earth, to meet his death and thus expiate people’s sins. God did not have to do this, Liang emphasizes, it was something that he chose to do.22 So evil remains for now, and God’s goodness with it.
Liang tells how this Highest God of Heaven sent his own holy son down from the heavens to earth, placing the child’s spirit in the body of a young pure woman, so that she would be pregnant and bring his body out into the world, even though untouched by man. She gave birth to the boy in a rustic hut, giving him the name Jesus, which translates as Savior of the World and Lord. At the time of his birth, an emissary from God appeared in the sky, calling out that no one needed to fear, for he brought good and joyful news, of the birth of a savior. And as he spoke, suddenly, from out of the clouds came a great celestial army of the emissaries of God, crying out, “Glory to God in the Highest, and on earth Taiping, Great Peace and good will toward men.”23 Since this took place on the same continent as China, adds Liang, one might expect some traces of it to be found in China’s own early classics. But that would be an erroneous expectation, for these events happened in the time of Emperor Ai of the Western Han dynasty, and the classics had been written long before. So though in China’s earliest books there can be found hints of the actions of the Highest God of Heaven, one cannot expect to find in them similar traces of his son.24
Liang’s text, too, provides a key to the linked significance of age and action. Liang describes how Jesus was a studious and hardworking child, who already showed his intelligence by the age of twelve. But he took his time to find his calling, only slowly developing his mission as a teacher. It was not until the age of thirty, the age that Hong is now as he reads the tract, that Jesus cast aside his old life and began to preach openly, explaining how his holy father had sent him down to earth with specific orders, to exhort the people of the earth to repent of their lascivious and their evil ways, to get rid of all their idols and images of false and Buddhist gods, and to follow only the way of the One True God.25
So Jesus taught, and gathered his disciples around him, till at the age of thirty-three he had completed his allotted span on earth and was vilified, tormented, and nailed to a cross, on which he seemed to die. At that time the sun and the moon lost their luster, and terrible earthquakes split apart the earth. But after three days and nights Jesus reasserted the divine nature with which he had originally been endowed, a nature that let him attain everything, “attain completeness,” and though lying in his tomb he brought himself back to life from his state of death. And in forty final days of preaching, he showed his followers how to spread his words, how those who believed God’s teachings would attain an everlasting happiness, while those ignoring them, or refusing to believe, would suffer for all eternity. His mission done, Jesus returned to Heaven, being greeted there by countless numbers of his father’s host.26
The reference to the era of Great Peace, Taiping, in the angel’s mouth at the time of Jesus’ birth, fits with another passage in which Liang explains the phrase “Tianguo,” Kingdom of Heaven. Liang shows that it can be used in two ways: one is the eternal happiness in Paradise, which will be enjoyed by the souls of all the righteous people when their physical bodies have died; the other is a community within this world, formed by congregations who believe in Jesus and worship the Lord of Heaven.27
The words of Jesus are like nothing Hong has heard before, although Confucian virtue has been the object of his studies for two decades. Liang gives a transcript of a speech Jesus made while seated on a mountaintop, as the words have been preserved in another sacred book, this one called “Madou” (Matthew), chapters 5 to 7. In one section Jesus tells his people to rejoice, not grieve, over their misfortunes:
Blessed are they which are persecuted for righteousness’ sake: for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are ye, when men shall revile you, and persecute you, and shall say all manner of evil against you falsely, for my sake. Rejoice, and be exceeding glad: for great is your reward in heaven: for so persecuted they the prophets which were before you.28
Jesus also tells his followers how to pray to their God, with these words:
After this manner therefore pray ye: Our Father which art in heaven, Hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done in earth, as it is in heaven. Give us this day our daily bread. And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us. And lead us not into temptation, but deliver us from evil: For thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory, for ever. Amen.29
And Jesus issues warnings that evil is pervasive and perhaps innate:
Beware of false prophets, which come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravening wolves. Ye shall know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes of thorns, or figs of thistles? Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. A good tree cannot bring forth evil fruit, neither can a corrupt tree bring forth good fruit. Every tree that bringeth not forth good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore by their fruits ye shall know them.30
Though Hong was not at the examination hall in 1841, when flying ink stones filled the air, in 1843, before reading the tracts, Hong Xiuquan has sat for the examinations a fourth time in Canton, and for the fourth time he has failed. In a passage in the first tract, Liang’s words affirm to Hong that taking the examinations is a senseless and self-defeating pastime.
This practice of Confucian teaching often is full of vanity or absurdity. The scholars pay reverence to the idols of Wenchang and Kuixing* and implore their protection, in order to broaden their knowledge and quicken their intellectual skills, so that they will pass at the head of the examination lists. Most Chinese who study the Confucian texts feel they must pay obeisance to these two idols; they beg these idols’ help in passing the provincial level examinations and then the national examinations, so they can be members of the capital’s Hanlin Academy and receive official posts to rule the people. How is it possible that everyone always worships these two idols, and yet there are many people who have been studying and taking the exams since their childhood, and reach the age of seventy or eighty without even passing the very lowest levels of the exams and becoming licentiates, let alone passing at the higher levels? Haven’t these men prayed to these idols every year? Why didn’t they win the idols’ protection, and pass successfully? From this we can see that these Confucian scholars are bewildered and obsessed by their ambitions, so they cling to their delusions and worship these idols instead of with a humble mind worshiping the Ruler of Heaven and Earth, the God who rules the entire world and all its wealth and glory, and thus being in accordance with the sacred principles of the Great Way.31
As Liang says elsewhere in the tracts, our lives are fleeting—which of us can be sure he will live to be fifty or sixty, let alone eighty or a hundred?32 Hong absorbs this message too. He never sits for the exams again.
To an extent, of course, as Liang’s words tell Hong, the Confucian scholars and their idols are no more misled than other people. Buddhists and Taoists, and the gullible and careless from all walks of life, get caught up in the same frenzied search for security and reassurance. In olden days, people limited their worship to the spirits of mountains and of rivers, or to the images of loyal officials and worthy scholars. But now people of all walks of life—scholars, farmers, artisans, merchants—worship every kind of image: those painted on paper, invoked in calligraphy or woodblock prints, fashioned out of polished stone, carved wood, modeled in clay, in colored porcelain, squared stones, or pyramids and cones.33
Wherever you look in China today, writes Liang, you find examples of this folly. Rich merchants and other wealthy families have the altars in their homes, to Guanyin, the Bodhisattva of Mercy, to the gods of wealth, of childbirth, of the well, of the kitchen, of the locality—their incense and lanterns, their offerings of wine, follow in endless succession.34 The farmers pray to their gods of crops and grains, begging their help in matters of wind and rain, redoubling their prayers when blight or mice or insects strike their fields. Never do they invoke the true Lord of All, creator of everything that grows.35
Similarly, the tailors say that Xianyuan, the Yellow Emperor, was the first to make humans clothes, so they worship him to gain the skills to prosper in their trade. The carpenters claim that Luban was the first to invent the art of exact measurement, so they erect their shrines to him, and greet his birthday with ritual plays, in order that they may prosper in their business.36 Sailors who roam the seas believe their fates are in the hands of the North Emperor, or the Heavenly Empress. They write their prayers out to these spirits and display them on their vessels, to keep them safe from storms and bring calm waters in every season, so that they too can profit from their ventures.37 As for the women and unmarried girls, for them it is any one of three spirits who gives protection, either Guanyin, or Madam Golden Flower, or the Minister of Births. They say that Guanyin is a woman, and thus she understands their hopes and pains and the hardship of their lot, and brings them special solace. As for Madam Golden Flower, she as a woman bore many sons, so she will help them do the same. Those who are childless, especially, invoke her aid. The Minister of Births can bring to them a quick delivery, if he so chooses, and save them from the worst of pains.38
If the Confucians are thus deluded, the craftsmen, and the women, one can expect no better from the Buddhist and the Taoist priests and nuns. The Taoists claim to know the triune secrets and forces of the universe, but which of us has ever seen them become immortal spirits and rise to Heaven? Humiliation is more commonly their lot.39 Chanting their sutras every day, yearning for the joys of the Western Paradise, what do the Buddhists pray to but a long dead man? He is unable to affect their fate, as some “dress beautifully in the very finest clothes, gorge themselves with food, indulge in lust and vice,” while others lie ravaged with sickness in the beds of hospitals, beg in the streets, or “die of starvation on some mountain road, their putrid carcasses a breeding ground for maggots.”40
Liang puts the lessons of these stories and the story of man’s disobedience both in the distant past and in the present. In ancient times, he writes, there was a sage named Moses, who led his people out of a foreign country into a desert. There, on a mountain with the name of Sinai, the Lord of Heaven gave him, in person, ten prohibitions that all his people should observe. Yet though Moses diligently tried to teach his people these divine instructions, they would not listen, and slowly, one by one, they died in the desert, often with the greatest suffering.41 So it is with those today who will not listen to Jesus’ teachings. The factors of time and distance play a part, writes Liang; everyone cannot receive the message all at once. But as the rising sun sends out its first reflections, and later its full blazing light, the news will slowly spread. Now the truth has come to Canton city, brought by foreign people on their ships. To achieve this task, they do not grudge a cost of tens of thousands in cash and gold, and even learn the Chinese language no matter how much toil it takes so they can translate the sacred books, and bring the message to the Chinese people. Now that task is done, the translation is completed, so all can get the full impact of the holy text’s complete decrees.42
This theme of Liang’s, though written years before, fits well with the realities around Canton, as the treaty settlement that ends the Opium War in 1842 is negotiated by the Manchus and the representatives of the British crown. The treaty ends forever the system of the thirteen hongs and foreign factories crowded on the Canton shore, and opens instead five ports—Canton being one—to foreign residence and trade. In 1843, additional treaties guarantee the rights of foreign Christian missionaries, both Protestant and Catholic, to build their churches in these cities, and freely to preach their faith. Buoyed by this concession, missionaries who had been sheltering in Hong Kong until the war was over, now move back to Canton. Gutzlaff is active once again, though busy translating for the British and even administering captured territories for them; and so is his good friend Issachar Roberts, who came from the Tennessee town of Shelbyville in 1837 at the age of thirty-five to work at Gutzlaff’s side. Roberts, a self-educated preacher, raised in the passionate religious world of tent revivals and covered-wagon services, independent-minded, free of supervision and bored with rules, is first to return, renting a little house just outside Canton’s walls. Despite the treaty provisions the virulence of anti-foreign feeling still makes it impossible to reside within. Dressing in Chinese clothes, working with a local convert tied by loyalty to him in person as well as to his redeemer, Jesus Christ, Roberts restlessly prowls the countryside, preaching in the Hakka dialect he has been studying, and distributing religious tracts.43
Liang does not say what ten prohibitions God issued to his servant Moses on the Mount of Sinai, and thus it is unclear what exactly Moses’ followers did or failed to do before they died their desert deaths. But in two of the other tracts Liang outlines six groups of acts that the highest God considers as the worst of evils: in one the list consists of murder, rebellion, stealing and swindling, adulterous lust, magical arts, and disobedience to one’s parents.44 In the other, Liang gives Jesus’ own list, as he told it to a rich young man who sought to enter the Kingdom of Heaven: Not to kill; not to commit adultery; not to steal; not to bear false witness; to honor your parents, and to love your neighbor as you love yourself. And Liang adds one new prohibition of his own: not to smoke opium, a vice as bad as any of the others.45
All human beings can recognize these actions to be evil, writes Liang. Why then, when all can see the harm, do people persevere in doing wrong? Partly because of human stubbornness, he answers, and partly because of ignorance of history, disregard of sacred truth, and obedience to social conventions that give the highest praise to those constructing temples and making precious offerings to the idols.46 But booksellers are to blame as well, for along with their Confucian classics and their books of morals they sell all kinds of lascivious short stories, novels, and plays, leading people into evil ways as directly as if they had openly preached evil to them. It is a melancholy fact that however many exhortations to virtue one might publish, most people prefer to read tales of sex and sin.47 There are two categories of human actions that are not so different as they sound: some people spend money to do evil, whereas others do evil to earn money.48 As for the Buddhist priests with their deceitful teaching of reincarnation, and the Taoists with their “Great Jade Emperor” and “Old Master of Transcendence Lao Zi,” they mislead the people even more than the pornographers do.49
How does one show that one believes, and that what one believes is right? Liang tells the story of one man, Paul (who like Hong had changed his name). This Paul persuaded people to give up their books of magical arts, preached so well against the idols that the makers of silver images feared they would lose their livelihoods, and exorcised the evil spirits from a madman, when all the other magic makers had failed. Paul tells the faithful in a foreign land that they need to receive the Holy Spirit, and that to do that they must be washed or purified not just in the name of John but in the name of Jesus Christ, for John had said he bathed them in repentance until Jesus would be with them. And when Paul purified them with the water, they received the Holy Spirit, and not only that, they could all speak different languages, and make prophecies.50
The passage is hard for Hong to understand, and nowhere in the tracts does Liang say exactly what was done with water, or when, or how, while Jesus lived. But in the sixth tract, talking of his own life with Milne, Liang reports the definition that Milne gave to him: “In the ritual of purification by water, one takes some clear water, and sprinkles it on the person’s head, or on his body. The inner meaning of this is to wash away the filth of the person’s sins, and allow the Holy Spirit to transform his heart. After one has received this ritual of purification by water, one comes to love goodness and hate evil, and sloughing off the old nature one becomes a new being.”51 On the next holy day, when Liang expressed his deep repentance and love of Jesus, Milne scattered clear water on his head, and he was purified. Sometime thereafter, Liang purified his wife with water by himself, and got Morrison to purify his son.52
The moral of this whole tragic yet joyful story rests on two different levels, Liang suggests. Long ago, God chose one country to be his own, the land that he named Israel. There he gave his prohibitions, and there he sent his son to save all human souls from sin. But just as in the time of Moses the prohibitions and God’s words were ignored, so was Jesus killed upon the cross and all his followers scattered. And God’s vengeance was terrible, for the evildoers in that land not only met their individual fates, but the whole country of Israel was itself subjugated, and “up to the present time this country is no more, and its people scattered among all the other nations.”53
Such a fate is also the final, absolute, and universal one for all unbelievers, Liang concludes, as the ninth tract ends. All the world must expect a Last Judgment, which will sweep upon all people as surely as the pains of a woman in labor, yet as furtively and unseen as a thief in the night. God’s retainers will unroll the scrolls on which all our sins are listed; all people of all nations shall be judged, as surely as the shepherd separates out his sheep from the mountain goats. To those who believed in Jesus, and sheltered the believers in his name, will come the blessings of almighty God. But for the others, there will be only eternal torment in the eternal fire, with the demons as their guardians.54
The throne of the Savior, at that final hour, will be like blazing wheels of fire, and the Savior will order his millions of attendants to burn all creatures to ashes in the flame of his father’s anger. As the Judgment ends, the Savior will descend in a cloud amidst the shouts of angels, blowing the trumpets of God his father, and all who believed early on in Jesus’ name and died for him shall be resurrected, followed by those who were slower to see the light, but did so before it was too late. And all those saved shall be raised in the cloud, and welcomed by the Savior in the heavens, and their bodies will be restrengthened and purified, and no one will be bride or groom, but all shall live like angels of the lord in Heaven.55
The collection of tracts is long, full of strange terms and stranger names, and there are many things that Liang does not explain. But Hong feels the key has opened up his head and heart. The man with the golden beard of whom he dreamed, and for whom he fought the demons, is God the Father, the Lord Ye-huo-hua, who created Heaven and earth. The elder brother who shone the golden seal upon the demons, fought at Hong’s side, yet scolded him severely is Jesus the Savior, son of God, killed on the cross and returned again to Heaven. The retainers who welcomed Hong and helped him in his heavenly battles are the angels who live with God. The texts unrolled before his eyes or explained to him point by point are the words of Liang’s, or the words of other sacred texts that Liang transcribed or summarized. The evil one, Yan Luo, is the demon devil serpent who ruined the happy life of man and woman in their first idyllic garden. The sword with which Hong fought the demons is like the sword that guarded the eastern gate of Paradise. God does speak directly to mankind, as he did to Moses on Mount Sinai, and as he has to Hong. Jesus too has lived and toiled upon the earth. The raging flood that almost swept away all living things is a sign of Hong’s own destiny. His name Huo, or fire, was tabooed because it was the middle name of God the Father. His new name Quan—“complete” or “whole”—begins, closes, and reverberates throughout the sacred texts. The Confucian examinations are worthless vanities, spreading false hopes, engendering false procedures. The foreigners, despite the opium and the wrath of some of their number, have good intentions, and perhaps will save the land from death. Idols are evil, and the festival days that mark the working Chinese year do not reflect the rhythms of worship due the highest God. Sin ravages the world, encouraged by false priests, the lustful, the pornographers. The cleansing rituals that Hong went through in Heaven were foretellers of his baptism. There are legions of demons still to slay on earth, for evil has infiltrated all the human race. And since Jesus is the son of God, and also Hong’s elder brother, then Hong is literally God’s Chinese son.
* Respectively named for the constellations Ursa Major and the Big Dipper, both worshiped as the God of Literature.