Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 225

1850.

Term for Elohim and Theos.

199

The native Shin are more important to our inquiry. What are they? The most numerous class of shin, and regarded with the greatest dread are kwei, some spiritual part of man, ghosts or manes of the dead, and generically called shin kwei. Are they regard- ed divine? Another class is the shin chú, ancestral tablets, and the most venerated objects of all Chinese idolatry. Among this class of objects of worship, is there, in the mind of the worshipers, the idea of there being any divine Being? By worshiping their ances- tral dead, the Chinese carry out their professed principles of filial piety to idolatry, but not to polytheism.

These objects of worship are all confessedly of human origin, men and women canonized, or the ghosts of the dead, whose malignant influences are feared. Of all these too, it is worthy of remark, that the Chinese established religious ritual sanctions only the worship of

the shin chú 神主 or ancestral worship. The common people

are prohibited by the same ritual from worshiping the two following classes: 1. The shin of the fields and particular localities, who have been appointed to their government by a higher power, and to which power they are amenable. They are regarded as exercising only a limited and delegated authority. Certain officers of govern- ment are required to worship them. The generic term for this class, corresponding very nearly to the genii of the Romans is shit tsih

2. A class of shin of supposed higher rank, who are design- nated according to the branch of the family to which they belong. If they belong to the visible world, they are called ti k'i; if to the invisible, they are called t'ien shin

Intelligent Chinese

who have such a knowledge of the Bible, as to be qualified to form an opinion, state that this class of shin occupy in the Chinese mind, much the same place assigned to angels in the sacred Scriptures. They are the beings commissioned and sent forth by the Supreme Ruler. No idea of divinity seems to be attached to them.

Of worshiped worthies and heroes there is an immense and still increasing catalogue.

There is another class of shin peculiar to the Rationalists, which probably had no existence in Chinese mythology before the time of Lautsz'. Several of these are called Shangti, but with an individual title to distinguish them from the Shangti of the sacred books. There is the Yuh-hwang Shángti E £ very generally worshiped, and the Hiuen-t'ien Shángtí, FL .There are other ti which are acknowledged by the state reli-

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