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NOTES AND ILLUSTRATIONS.
You suggest that either the name Shang-ti should have been left untranslated, or that it should have been rendered by Supreme Ruler. If the first expedient had been adopted, all readers unacquainted with Chinese would have taken Shang-ti for a proper name, such as Jupiter, while Dr. Legge, whose Chinese scholarship you do not call in question, states that it 'never became with the people a proper name like the Zeus of the Greeks' (Preface, p. xxv.). If, on the contrary, Shang-ti had been rendered by Supreme Ruler, as was done by Medhurst, or by le Seigneur and le Souverain Maître, as was done by Gaubil, would these expressions have evoked in the minds of European readers any conception different from that of God, the true God?
How could missionaries in China, if they are willing to translate Shang-ti by Supreme Ruler, continue to represent Him as a false God, or, at all events, as not quite true? Are there any who still believe in the actual existence of false gods, or of gods not quite true? Do they believe that Bel, or Jupiter, or Varuna, or Shang-ti were so many individual beings existing by the side of Jehovah? They were, if you like, false, or, at least, imperfect names of God; but never the names of false or imperfect gods.
I have tried to show in all my writings on language, mythology, or religion, and more especially in my Hibbert lecture on the origin and growth of religion, as illustrated by the religions of India,' how we ought to read in the manifold names of the Deity, preserved to us in the ancient languages of the world, the gradual growth of human thought and human language in their endeavour to find better and better names for what after all admits of no name. What an ancient Christian martyr said, ο θεός όνομα ουκ έχει, God has no name,' is true, in one sense; but from an historical point of view, we should, I think, be equally right if we called God πολλών ονομάτων μορφή μία, “ of many names the one person.
