Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 404

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Defense of an Essay &r

個神

July.

Dr. M's complaint wholly gratuitous. My quoting all Dr. Medhurst's Dictionaries against him has been thought by some, I have been told, an unjustifiable ad hominem inethod of arguing; the reason for doing so I have distinctly stated in my Essay. Dr. Medhurst has a great peculiarity for a controversial writer, in not referring to his past writ- ings, however much he may contradict what he has written before on the same subject. Of this he has given many instances since this controversy commenced. His Dictionaries, as I showed in my Essay, all render shin, a god. In a communication addressed to the editor of the Chinese Repositary, dated Shanghai Sept. 14th 1846. (Vol. XVI, p. 34) he writes,

"You may say

but that means a god, not the one God. Shin means without doubt the gods, or the beings of the invisible world, and not God, the only living and true Jehovalı, who made all things." In his “Theology of the Chinese”, written im- mediately afterwards, he renders shin always spirit,—not god, denies that it means god, and yet does not refer to either his Dictionaries or this letter, or inform his readers in any way, that he had formerly, yea, so very recently held the opinior. he was opposing; nor does he condescend to mention a single reason for his change of views. This was the reason, to inform those who had to study this controversy, of this important fact, why I thought it incumbent on me to quote his dictionaries and other writings. If Dr. Medhurst had made his readers acquainted with these facts, I should have been very glad to have been spared the task of doing so; the facts I thought then, and still think, too important to the interests of truth, to be unknown. Dr. Medhurst, I fancy, both thought and wrote much more dispassionate- ly on this subject fifteen years ago, than when penning his “Theology of the Chinese,” and his "Inquiry." He was then shocked with the Chinese materialism, and found the Confucianists, and all the other sects, without a first cause, and counting no divinity eternal. In his "Theology of the Chinese" at p. 82 et seq., because he finds the primordial substance which dividing itself into its

purer and parts produced heaven and earth, called "the, supreme one, and the great extreme, which including three, consists of one,” i. e. Heaven, earth and man, which make one universe, he rejoices" that the Divine Being has not left himself without a witness in this dark land? thinks the Chinese must have derived these ideas by traditiona- ry knowledge from the sons of Noah, aud remarks that the phrase "in- cluding three consists of one" see:ns to bear some allusion to the mysterious Doctrine of the Trinity, which may have been derived by nadition from the Patriarchal age” He afterwards doubts the cor

grosser