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any religious or intellectual opposition, seeking to hold up the purity of their truths by disdaining any claims to truth which arise from other ideological positions. Their statements are, therefore, at best suspect. Certainly, there are historical examples of missionaries who operated under cultural prejudices which clearly obstructed their understanding of China.
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A case in point is the study of the translation of a Chinese Classic by David Collie (d. 1828) written by William Bysshe Stein in 1970. Stein, at the end of his study, leaves the impression that missionary translations, including Collie's, were incompetent, biased, and unsophisticated works. This evaluation came in part as a result of Stein's reading of Collie through the eyes of the American philosopher, Henry David Thoreau, who had preferred the translation of Guillaume Pauthier, a non-missionary, which had appeared in 1840.
Collie certainly included some very insensitive comments in his footnotes and, at times, made translation errors. However, Stein made his judgement on the basis of a casual reading of Collie, assuming both the wisdom of Thoreau's judgements against Collie and the superior quality of Pauthier's renditions. In fact, Collie's work was a vast improvement over those of his Protestant predecessors, Morrison and Marshman. Providing a more complete translation of The Four Books than either of his predecessors, Collie made far fewer attacks on Confucius and Confucianism than Stein suggests. Although his translation was at times uneven and even simply wrong, much of it was worthwhile, including the helpful translations of classical commentaries in the footnotes.
Having assumed the worst regarding Collie, Stein's presumption of Pauthier's superiority, supported almost solely by the inclinations of Thoreau, can be shown to be terribly misguided. Pauthier's style of translating included, at times, great verbosity and an extreme liberty with the text. His exegesis involved reading into the Confucian text the values of the French Revolution; this made the text more immediately appealing to his audiences, while being all the more distorted because of the freedoms taken in rendering the Confucian worldview.
More thorough scholars than Stein, however, also stand in