194
Term for Elohim and Theos.
Arnit.,
use, and application, it is a term adapted to translate the esos of the New Testament? sog, as we will have occasion to notice, appears primarily, anciently, and from common use, to mean, not a spiritual and mysterious being, or something invisible and inscrutable, &c., but by way of eminence, Deity or Divine essence; eos of classical use would be the God of eminence. So i Csog of the New Testament use means the God therein revealed. The idea, that the translators of the LXX., or the writers of the New Testament, employed so be- cause it was such a generic term as the advocates of shin claim it to be, is contrary to reason and common sense. Such an idea assumes as a fact, the still more absurd idea lying back of it, that those who first used so for Deity were originally and never anything else than polytheists. The reasonable and common sense grounds for the Septuagint and New Testament use of dog are, that those translators and sacred writers found sos to be the term, in the Greek language, used for Deity from earliest antiquity, when those who employed it, were still monotheists. It was the term for God xal' sğoxùv; and presently it will be shown, that the Greeks never did use @sos in the unlimited sense of shin, but generally by way of eminence for God or Gods. Although the sacred writers found sog most sadly abused and misapplied by the after mythology of the people, they still used it, and restored it to its original and specific application.
The idea is advanced above that the Greeks were originally mo- notheists; and it will be seen from parts of my argument that I enter- tain the same idea of the Chinese. I have been surprised to learn, that by some this is regarded as a strange hypothesis without foun- dation. The opposite idea, that the Chinese not only have not now, but never had any knowledge of the true God, is the strange hypothe- sis, which should be most clearly established, before it is received and made a ground of argument. Christian philosophy, observation and history, all unite in testifying that the tendency of man, without divine revelation, has in religion ever been, to remove farther and farther from the truth. Such is the teaching of Paul in the first of Romans. As he came from his Maker's hand was man a polytheist ?-Did man issue from the old world, wrecked by the flood, into the new, a polytheist? Although mankind soon afterwards corrupted themselves, yet do not reason and common sense, does not history inspired and profane, and does not tradition, combine in giving testimony that distinct traces of some knowledge of the true God did continue to exist long after the flood? Reason and common sense testify that it is very improbable that mankind in the course of two or three gene-