Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 459

1850.

Defense of an Essay, &c.

« Si volet usus,

Quem penes arbitrium, et jus et norma loquendi.'

421

Dr. Legge regards this common-sense view of the matter, we may suppose, almost in the same light as he does a heresy. His doctrine is: "Does Dr. Boone doubt that we shall remodel the literature of the Chinese ? Whatever there is in the literature of this great country that is vicious and of error, will be driven away by the advance of truth, like the chaff before the wind. Nothing that man's intellect has wrought in the vanity of its imaginations, will abide the sifting of science, and the presence of God's book...... But we can not remodel the language of the country. The literature is the work of man; the language is the work of God. As surely as the corn that grows from the bosom of the earth is from God, so also is language that grows up out of the mind of man." p. 20. He speaks of ideas "inher- ing” in words, and remarks, that on a comparison of the meanings given of God, Theos, and Elohim in Johnson's, Robinson's and Ge- senius' Lexicons, "there is felt (the italics are his own) the truth of the remark that Elohim and Theos are correctly rendered in English by God.' If Dr. L.'s theory be true, with what reverence should we regard all the divinely inspired words of this heathen language! How impious of us to attempt to change the meaning of any word by our usus loquendi, (e. g. of any appellative noun, sc. the general name of their objects of worship,) as this would imply an impression on our part, that the Chinese had false conceptions of the objects, when they classed them together under a common appellative, and that "the language" was the work of their own fallible minds, not "the work of God," thus wrongly ascribing to men a work of God, and robbing him of his due!* This peculiar view of the nature of language exercises a most unhappy influence upon Dr. L. as a philo- logical inquirer. This we shall see as we proceed.

But to return to the point in hand: if the use or non-use of the article affords a reliable test of the suitableness of a word to render Elohim and so, we wonder Dr. Legge did not put the words he

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* It is very strange to me that Dr. Legge did not perceive how completely these views of his are at variance with those of Bacon, quoted by him, with approbation, on the 39th page of his "Argument." "The error [of calling the Chinese shin gods] supplies us with a fine specimen of what Bacon calls the idola fori. These,' he says, are the most troublesoine of all causes of error. They arise out of the commerce or intercourse of society, and especially from language Words are cominonly given to things according to vulgar apprehen- sion, and distinguish things by differences apprehensible to a common under- standing; and when an intellect more acute, and more diligent observation, would distinguish things better the words cry out against the endeavor