Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 514

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Defense of an Essay, &c.

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classics, there are several other beings styled Shángti. But this is not sufficient to prove that the term is used as the name of a class: it may be a name common to many individuals, and yet be always used to designate a definite individual, and not any one indifferently of the individuals so called. There are great numbers of individuals called William, Thomas, &c., yet these are singular terms, not common: in each different family, the William designates a different person, yet the speaker uses this word to point out definitely a single individual as the subject of discourse, and the family and other circumstances define who the person spoken of is. So with the title "the Queen," in England, at the present moment, notwithstanding the fact that so many have borne this title, it is in effect a proper name, or, in other words, it designates H. M. Victoria as definitely as a proper name would. This, I am persuaded, is the case with the title Shángti, the Supreme Ruler. It designates, when standing alone, the chief god of either the Confucian or Táuist systems, and the family in which it is spoken renders definite which one is meant, as in the case of the common proper naines William, Thomas, &c.

I would earnestly beg my missionary brethren who are in the habit of using Shángti for God, to inquire quietly of their teachers and other literary men, and then of the common poeple, what they respectively understand by the phrase Shúngti, and I am persuaded that the result of such investigation, if conducted carefully and without a resort to leading questions, will be the conviction that by this phrase a definite individual being is always understood; and that this being will be found to be either the Tien of the classics, the Yuh-hwáng of the Tauists, or the Tien-ti, Heaven and Earth, of the common people. If either one of these be the true God, this fact might justify one in using the phrase, but if they are all alike false, and the hearer will be sure to understand us, as exhorting him to worship a given one of them (which one, his creed would determine), how can we, if under these circumstances we exhort the Chinese to worship Shángtí, avoid the charge of exhorting thein to the worship of a false god?

"can

But if Shangti should be proved by classical and popular usage to be a common term, the fact that it is a relative term, which " not indicate the essence, nor express anything of the being of Jehovah," is sufficient to decide the question against its use to render Elohim and 80s. If the word by which we render Elohim and @sos

does not indicate the essence, nor express anything of the being of Jehovah,” but is merely the exponent of the relationship he sustains to his crea- tures, what word are we to use in our Chinese treatises when we