married and Jesus also, for Chinese practice requires the marrying of a person having a certain name into a family of a different name. Heaven must, therefore, have had other families, inferior to God's but sufficiently high to furnish consorts to the supreme divine family.
As regards the scheme of salvation and the work of Jesus in the world, there is a passage in "The Trimetrical Classic" which almost exactly paraphrases the words of John 3:16:
But the great God
Out of pity to mankind,
Sent his first-born son
To come down into the world.
His name is Jesus,
The Lord and Saviour of men,
Who redeems them from sin
By the endurance of extreme misery.
Those who believe will be saved
And ascend up to heaven;
But those who do not believe
Will be the first to be condemned.
If we search through the odes, essays, and proclamations referred to as our sources, we may discover other references of the same kind showing some acquaintance with the Scriptures of the West. But there is little evidence that Hung and his followers comprehended the inner teachings of Christianity. The spiritual virtues of humility, charity, purity of heart, forgiveness, and yearning for fellowship with God and Christ, are wanting altogether or have been transformed into a Confucian interpretation of virtue in terms of right conduct. The vices and evils of the age are attacked and the great virtues
