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ON THE CHINESE NAME FOR GOD.
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point, I readily admit, it is by no means easy to give a decisive answer. In fact, I can well understand why many missionaries in China should have hesitated to identify the Shang-ti of the Confucians with the God they come to preach, and all I can do is to try to explain to you why, in spite of . all objections, I myself agree with Dr. Legge in accepting Shang-ti, when it occurs in the ancient Scriptures of the Chinese, as a name intended for the true God.
There are, perhaps, passages in the sacred texts of the Chinese in which Shang-ti is spoken of in what we should call mythological language, language, in our opinion, inapplicable to the Supreme Ruler of the Universe. But does it follow, therefore, that the Chinese, when they formed the name of Shang-ti, did not mean the true God, or that the best among them had never had any idea of the true God? You know far better than I do that there must be in the prayers and creeds of all religions a compromise between the language of the wise and the foolish, the old and the young, and that the sacred texts of no nation, not even those of Jews and Christians, are entirely free from childlike, helpless, poetical, and what are called mythological expressions. There is, perhaps, no better name for God than Father, and there are few religions in which that name has not been used ; yet, in order to render that name applicable to God, we must take out of it almost everything it implies in ordinary usage. Our own word God was borrowed by our ancestors from heathen temples, and the names for God used by the Romanic nations come from deus, Sanskrit deva, which deva is a mere derivation of diy, the sky.
And, if we are not to translate Shang-ti by God, what are we to do? You would not say that the Chinese, alone of all nations on earth, had never any word for God at all, for you yourselves say that they deified the sky, and how could people deify the sky or anything else without possessing an idea and a word for deity ?
