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VI. Miscalculated Significance
After the revolutions of China and the near dismantling of Britain's empire, one can ask what the significance of Legge's career is for today's changed world. One answer was suggested by Lindsey Ride, who claimed that:
"Legge was going to be a missionary to his own people and race first; he was going to translate and explain the learning of the East to the scholars and the missionaries of the West."
Ride went on to support this by citing the 1877 speech to the General Missionary Conference in Shanghai. Ride's biographical account of Legge is easily the most balanced and best informed of all the writings summarizing Legge's life until the 1980s. Despite this, however, Ride does not give a precise account of Legge's personal motivations and the context in which he was writing.
Legge was a Christian and humanitarian sinological scholar: he was an academic by talent and training, and a Christian by conviction and character. He was concerned to translate and explain Chinese literature to the West, but he was just as much concerned to portray to the West the Chinese in their times of need. He aimed both to evaluate their cultural heritage and to minister to their religious inadequacies. Thus he alerted the English public to the famines in China in 1878, taught texts of the Chinese Bible at Oxford along with other Chinese literature, and, while at Oxford, produced not only the translations for The Sacred Books of the East, but also his most direct and scholarly apologetics for the Chinese need for Christ. Legge was never only a scholar, or interested only in explaining Chinese learning to the West.
VII. Anti-missionary Bias
Perhaps the most serious misunderstanding is the claim that no missionary could ever be a sinologist. The basis of this judgement does have a logical foundation, and can be expressed in something like the following terms: missionaries are absolutists, believing the message they hold to be rationally supreme, and historically demonstrable, and often (though this is not always explicitly stated) culturally preferable. In the light of these beliefs, they become intolerant of
185
VI. Miscalculated Significance
After the revolutions of China and the near dismantling of Britain's empire, one can ask what the significance of Legge's career is for today's changed world. One answer was suggested by Lindsey Ride. who claimed that:
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"Legge was going to be a missionary to his own people and race first; he was going to translate and explain the learning of the East to the scholars and the missionaries of the West."***
Ride went on to support this by citing the 1877 speech to the General Missionary Conference in Shanghai. Ride's biographical account of Legge is easily the most balanced and best informed of all the writings summarizing Legge's life until the 1980s. Despite this, however, Ride does not give a precise account of Legge's personal motivations and the context in which he was writing.
Legge was a Christian and humanitarian sinological scholar: he was an academic by talent and training, and a Christian by conviction and character. He was concerned to translate and explain Chinese literature to the West, but he was just as much concerned to portray to the West the Chinese in their times of need. He aimed both to evaluate their cultural heritage and to minister to their religious inadequacies. Thus he alerted the English public to the famines in China in 1878, taught texts of the Chinese Bible at Oxford along with other Chinese literature, and, while at Oxford, produced not only the translations for The Sacred Books of the East, but also his most direct and scholarly apologetics for the Chinese need for Christ. Legge was never only a scholar, or interested only in explaining Chinese learning to the West.
VII. Anti-missionary Bias
Perhaps the most serious misunderstanding is the claim that no missionary could ever be a sinologist. The basis of this judgement does have a logical foundation, and can be expessed in something like the following terms: missionaries are absolutists, believing the message they hold to be rationally supreme, and historically demonstrable, and often (thought this is not always explicitly stated) culturally preferable. In the light of these beliefs, they become intolerant of
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