1850.
Defense of an Essay. &c.
425
limited attainments in knowledge which the men of that infant age of the race had made, the temptation to polytheism must have been very strong-perfectly overwhelming where there was nothing but a faint tradition through a long line of ungodly men, or the light of nature, to instruct them in the unity of the Godhead. We think from these considerations, that the inference is against our finding, hun- dreds of years after the dispersion from Babel (when they have be- come sufficiently civilized to begin recording events, and their history commences), in the language of any of the tribes that were com pletely separated from the chosen people, a word which answers to Elo- him when used propriè : that is, a word which is used as the name of a self-existent, almighty, spiritual Being, who created the heavens and the earth. At any rate, the circumstances are such that no one is entitled to take it for granted that there must have been such a word in each of the dialects now spoken by men, which was after- wards corrupted by the usage of polytheists. Polytheism may not be older than the word Elohim, as the Hebrew may have been the language spoken by Noah; but we know it was much older than the time of Moses, who is the first writer in Hebrew whose writings have reached us. We think it is probably older than either of the words @sos, Deus, or God, and shall in a subsequent part of this Defense state some of the considerations which have led us to think that in Greece at least, ɛog was used impropriè, long before it was used propriè. It is time however, now to return to Dr. Legge's first fortification of the inference derived from his grammatical argument.
If we admit the fact to be, in the case of all existing languages, as Dr. Legge supposes, I can not see how he can derive any inference from it in favor of his supposition that the word must be a relative term. Whether we suppose that the word god was first used as the name of the true God, and was afterwards applied to false gods, or that it had been previously applied to a number of beings, and was claimed afterwards as properly applicable only to one, would not at all affect, so far as I can see, the question whether the word was first used as a relative or absolute term. To decide the point we are con- tending about, we must inquire, Why, in either case, was this name given? Ist, Whether the being or beings, as the case might be, were called by this name because he or they were supposed to possess certain properties or qualities, which constituted them subsisting be- ings? or 2d, Whether they had this name from their being regarded as merely sustaining a certain relation to some other beings or things? To
that it must have been from the latter view that the name prove
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