Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 520

482

Medhurst's Inquiry.

SEP.

There is also, we think, a singular want of accuracy in the use of terms throughout the Inquiry. Under what Dr. Medhurst calls "the correlates of Shin,” in the abstract, page 7, and in the concrete, page 75, are thrown together terms having, so far as we can discover, no reciprocal relation to Shin: take for examples, mú ⇓ "mother," and nü # 女

a female of the human species;" and also Ki ≥ “self” and chin “truth;” where is the reciprocal relation here, so that the existence of these four terms is made to depend on Shin? Father and Son are correlates; so are King and Subjects; but not so Shin and mú; skin and nũ; etc. In like manner in the opening of the Ana- lysis, on page 4, under the first grand division, we have, as an illustra- tion of shin, in the abstract (used for the soul or vital principle,) the following, "when the new-born babe comes to the gate of life, as it falls to the ground, it becomes a sang shin living soul." This is accurately quoted from the pamphlet word Shin.” In the early history of our race, we read, "and man became a living soul." This phrase perhaps suggested to Dr. Med- hurst the rendering he has given; but be the sense of shin, in this in- stance, what you please, the subject of the proposition is babe, which surely is a concrete, and not an abstract term. So in Genesis, in the phrase, “living soul,” the noun is used, not in the abstract, but the

concrete sense.

on the true meaning of the

One point more is unsatisfactory; Dr. Medhurst is unwilling to ad- mit that Shin means God or Gods, Divinity or Divine, and declares that its primary and radical meaning is spirit or spiritual, “or some- thing nearly allied thereto." Oo p. 20 in his Inquiry, he says:—

Од

"In a tract entitled, 'The true meaning of the word Shin,' already refer red to, the quotations were divided into two sections, those which exhibited

Shin in the abstract, and those in the concrete form. With respect to the former, the writer expressed himself very decidedly, that the word Shin means spirit, or something nearly allied thereto; and gave utterance to his conviction that the passages quoted under the first head could not be trans- lated by substituting the word God or Divinity for spirit, without offering the greatest violence to the Chinese language. He retains that conviction; and he now calls upon all those who persist in using the word Shin for God, to translate those passages upon their principles, and make sense of them; if they cannot, and if they cannot rebut the argument, that according to the sense attached to Shin in three-eighths of the passages quoted in the Chinese Thesaurus under that word, it means spirit, and especially the human spirit, let them not stand up before God and man, and tell the Chinese that there is only one Shin.”

Much more of the same kind we have elsewhere; and on the very next page,

"the conclusion" is drawn that in rendering their books, and in endeavoring to express the ideas which they wished to convey,