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Page 128.
ON THE CHINESE NAME FOR GOD.
The old controversy whether t'i in Chinese should be translated by God, and whether God should be translated by Ti, was revived in 1880 by some of the Bishops and Missionaries in China, who addressed the following letter to me.
SHANGHAI, CHINA, June 25, 1880. SIR, -We, the undersigned missionaries labouring among the Chinese, have had brought under our notice the volume on the Chinese religion which forms one of the series you are now editing under the general title of The Sacred Books of the East.'
We fully agree with your prefatory statement that much of the value and utility of the series must depend on the absence of any colour borrowed from theory or prejudice,' and we therefore deplore the fact that in the important volume alluded to there has been, as we conceive, a forgetfulness of the principle which was laid down at the outset. We refer to the meaning which has in this book throughout been attached to the term 'Shang-ti,' sQ frequently found in the Chinese classics.
You can be no stranger to the fact that a controversy has long existed among Chinese scholars as to who or what is meant by the term or title Shang-ti.' Some hold that it designates the God of the Christian Scriptures, while others feel themselves utterly unable to accept it in such a sense. Whatever the rights of this question are, the controversy is a great fact and ought not to be ignored. It arose, as is
