Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 623

1850.

Defense of an Essay, &c.

581

that drog in the Homeric age meant a god, and if used xal' sğoxnx, designated the Homeric Zoʊg, and not the Being who is truly and properly God, still I think that the position for which I contend that the general name of the false gods of a people should be used as the appellative name of such a Being, when He is to be first made known to them, can be shown to be correct. That the Chinese are in this position has been already sufficiently shown. We have seen that the Tien of the Shú King, worshiped alternately with Ti Earth, in the kiáu sacrifice can not be accounted God (propriè) and I think it is certain that there has no Anaxagoras yet arisen among the philo- sophers of China, who has clearly taught an intelligent first cause of the heavens and the earth, or who has pointed out any Being, who is the author of all other beings extrinsic to himself.

If my idea, however, is correct, that Homer, Hesiod and the Greeks of their age, used éros, as the general name of their deities, designat- ing any one of them indifferently by this name, to be determined by the context, or occasionally using it when standing absolutely to de- signate Zeus, the highest Being known to them; then, when the phi- losophers learned from foreign travel, or from their own reflections, that there was an intelligent First Cause, a Being wholly different from Zsus, and one who had not been spoken of before; the question must have arisen, by what name He should be called? Anaxagoras called his "Disposing Mind, the cause of all things" Osos, and from this grew

up

the monadic esos of the Greek philosophers.

But whether we may consider this course, viz., that of calling God (propriè) by the general name of their objects of worship, when He is to be first made known to a heathen people ignorant of Him, to be sustained by the analogous action of the Greek philosophers or not; it can, I think, be clearly shown by independent reasoning to be the correct course to be pursued under such circumstances. Be- cause men fail to discover a "first cause," to which they ascribe spirituality, free-will, intelligence, omnipotence, &c., we must not conclude that they have had no thoughts on the subject of Deity. "No one," says Morrell, “will affirm that the earlier ages of the world were destitute of any searchings after God. So far from that, everything in the mythological period was wondrously gilded with the divine. The only thing to be noticed is that men in those ages con- versed mainly with nature; that they formed their conceptions of the numina divina without much reflection, and chiefly from nature; and that the argument from this source resulted more frequently than not, in polytheism. Can we say that the process was illogical? I think