Directory_and_Chronicle_1850 — Page 649

1850.

Defense of an Essay, &c.

607

to teach. If therefore seems to me that, as among all the Chinese gods there is not one who is self-existent, not one who is truly and properly God, we may rejoice that the general name of their gods was never used to designate any one of them as Shin xa?' ov; this use of the term, when put absolutely to designate a definite individual being, being reserved by God's providence, for his own servants to introduce, as the absolute appellative name of Ilimself, who alone can claim to be the God by way of eminence, the alone God.

Shin never having been used to designate any definite individual, the indefiniteness of this term has been felt by many as a great dif- ficulty in the way of its use to render Elohim. That the word is thus indefinite there can be no doubt, and that our being obliged to use so indefinite a word to render Elohim is a inatter much to be regretted, is clear; but this is not so much an objection against shin, as against the whole Chinese language, and is, if the Chinese really know no be- ing who is truly and properly God, just what we might have expected; for without a clear apprehension, that among the beings called by the one general name, answering to that of God among us," (to use the words of Dr. Barrow quoted above p. 575) there was one, who himself uncreated and self-existent, was the author of all the rest, and of all things beside, we could not expect that this general name would have been used to designate any xaî' ¿ğoxýv, for such a use has a monothe- istic force about it, and gives an absolute eminence to this one, which nothing but his being the cause of all the others would, we may sup- pose, suggest, or seem to justify.

In the Confucian classics their chief god Ticn is never so conceived of; he is never supposed to have made tith earth, or any of the ticu shin celestial gods. He is, as we have so often said above, merely the chief of his class, and is therefore more appropriately dis- tinguished from the other shin by a title of office or dignity, than he would be by a xal' ¿xv use of the general name of the class (shin), just as in the case of the chief among the men in China, who is in like manner distinguished from his fellowmen by a title of office or dignity, and not by the xɑ7' ¿§oxv use of the word jin Aman: the only dif

ference being, that whereas Yáu or Shun is simply Tí Yúu, the Em- peror Yáu, or T Shun, the Emperor Shun, and their remarks are introduced by the phrase Ti yuch the Emperor said: 7′′icn is called Shángti, the Ruler or Emperor on high, and he is so imper- sonal a being in their conceptions, that I do not romember a single sentence in which the phrase "Shangli yuch the Ruler

Shángtí ±, on high says," occurs.