Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 450

412

I

Defense of an Essay, &c.

Aug.

with respect to the character of this appellative; is it absolute or is it relative? This also is a question of fact, to be determined by an appeal to the usus loquendi of the word. If Dr. Legge understands generic as absolute appellative, and desires to deny that the word Elohim is generic in this sense, he makes the very issue which I desired to make in my Essay, when I defined shin to be the name of a class of beings, and called “ti a mere relative term, denoting office, and not an appellative noun." Dr. Legge's strictures on my use of the word "appellative noun" in this last sentence, are just ; I wanted the opposite of "relative," and the proper term "absolute" did not occur to me. I am glad that Dr. Legge has called attention to my mistake, and brought up the question more clearly for discussion, by pointing out the proper terms to be used, viz., absolute and relative. agree with him that the point is a fundamental one, and regret that I did not, in that part of my Essay, express my meaning more accu. rately. That Dr. Legge intends to maintain, in sober earnest, that God is a relative term, and not absolute, appears not only from his use of these words, but from his carefully defining the sense in which he uses the word relative, and from his assuring us that, “God does not indicate the essence, nor express anything about the being of Jehovah." This last statement is only a just consequence of the preceding one, "that God is a relative term;" but I should have thought the mere writing out the proposition in this form would have awakened Dr. Legge to a sense of its incorrectness, and caused him to blot out all he had written on the subject. Dr Legge tells us very correctly, from Rees' Cyclopædia, that relative words “include a kind of opposition between them; yet so as that one can not be without the other."

Will Dr. Legge tell us then, what that is without which Jehovah could not be God? He answers on p. 5 its correlative is creatures.' "As soon as the first man was called into existence, Jehovah stood to him in the relation of God." Is the eternity of God one of the articles of Dr. Legge's creed? If so, to be consistent with the view above expressed, he must maintain the eternity of the creation also. On p. 11, Dr. Legge quotes the principle of the Grecian philosophers, ex nihilo nihil fit.” However true this doctrine may be when ap- plied to every "material cause," does Dr. Legge regard it as true. when applied to the efficient cause-to God?

-to God? Does he deny a crea- tion from nothing 63 aux ovwv, so that there never was a time when God existed alone, before He had created anything? If Dr Legge answers, as we have no doubt he will, that he believes in the eternal existence of the Being, and that this Being, when existing absolutely alone

Page 450Page 451