Issachar Roberts

Lindesay Brine says that the Rev. Issachar J. Roberts, of one of the American missions, came to China in 1837 and worked chiefly at Canton. Roberts himself wrote in 1852 that a Chinese who seemed to have been Hong Xiuquan had studied the Scriptures with him for two months or more, had presented a written account of his vision and had asked to be baptised, but had gone to Guangxi “before we were fully satisfied of his fitness” (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 76–79, with Roberts’s letter of 1852).

Brine relates that Hong wrote to him after taking Nanjing, that Roberts settled in the city about the end of October 1860, and that he was given yellow robes and a crown of rank (Brine, Taeping Rebellion p. 295). In the letter in which he explains his departure Roberts says that he had been the religious teacher of Hong in 1847 and a friend of the movement, but that after fifteen months among the Taiping he was wholly opposed to them. Hong’s toleration and his many chapels, he writes, were “a farce, of no avail in the spread of Christianity”, and he left on 20 January 1862 after the Kan-wang, Hong Rengan, had killed his servant before his eyes (Brine, Taeping Rebellion pp. 296–298, Roberts’s letter of January 1862). See the Taiping Heavenly Kingdom.