Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 460

422

Defense of an Essay, &c.

AUG.

""

"Su-

Can he say proposes to use, Supreme Ruler," to this test. prome Ruler made the world?" But it is time I should go on to "the considerations" which Dr. Legge adduces to fortify his inference.

The first is, The regarding God as a relative term "meets and ex- plains all the facts of the case." This is a resort to the true inductive method, an appeal to the usus loquendi—the facts of the case, and by this appeal we will cheerfully abide. The facts of the case Dr. Legge tells us are,

"that men served the true God before they wrongly imagined any other. When they took his attributes, and

gave them to other beings, real or fictitious, they called them by the name which belonged to him only." This appears to us a correct account of what must have been the case with the first men, those who used the primi- tive language; but Dr. Legge's proposition, "men served the true God before they wrongly imagined any other," is an indefinite proposition, which is not true if it be taken universally. If he says, Some men, the first men, those who spoke the primitive language, served the true God before they conceived of false gods, and that the word God must there- fore have been used by them propriè, before it was ever used impro- priè, his proposition is no doubt perfectly correct; but it can have no bearing on the English word God, or the Chinese words Shángti or Shin, unless he is prepared to contend that the English or Chinese was the primitive language. If Dr. Legge will make his proposition univer- sal,—“all men served the true God before they wrongly imagined any other," its fallacy is at once apparent; it would require all men to have been monotheists before they were polytheists, which is contrary to what we all know to be the fact. The facts of the case, so far as they can affect the present nations of men and their languages, appear

to me to be these.

In the 10th chapter of Genesis, we read, “And unto Eber were born two sons; the name of one was Peleg; for in his days was the earth divided." And in the next chapter: "The whole earth was of one language and of one speech. And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they

• The reason the word god in English does not need the article to designate definitely the true God seems to me capable of very easy explanation. The English are monotheists; they hold that there is only one God; this word therefore according to their faith is properly the name of but one being, and "designates this being in a definite manner, so that there is no need of any sign to point out the particular individual to whom it is applied." It is natural that monotheists should fall into such a usage, so that the word standing ab- solutely should designate Jehovah, and that it should require a sign to make it refer to any other being.