Lest it be supposed that such accidents happen to Sanskrit scholars only, or that this fever is bred only in the jungles of Indian mythology, I shall mention at least one other case which will show that this disease is of a more general character, and that want of caution will produce it in every climate.
Before the discovery of Sanskrit, China had stood for a long time in the place which was afterwards occupied by India. When the ancient literature and civilization of China became first known to the scholars of Europe, the Celestial Empire had its admirers and prophets as full of enthusiasm as Sir W. Jones and Lieutenant Wilford, and there was nothing, [pg 130] whether Greek philosophy or Christian morality, that was not supposed to have had its first origin among the sages of China. The proceedings of the Jesuit missionaries in China were most extraordinary. They had themselves admitted the antiquity of the writings of Confucius and Lao-tse, both of whom lived in the sixth century B. C.[66] But in their zeal to show that the sacred books of the Chinese contained numerous passages borrowed from the Bible, nay, even some of the dogmas of the later Church, they hardly perceived that, taking into account the respective dates of these books, they were really proving that a kind of anticipated Christianity had been accorded to the ancient sages of the Celestial Empire. The most learned advocate of this school was Father Prémare. Another supporter of the same view, Montucci,[67] speaking of Lao-tse's Tao-te-king, says:—
“We find in it so many sayings clearly referring to the triune God, that no one who has read this book can doubt that the mystery of the most holy Trinity was revealed to the Chinese more than five centuries before the advent of Christ. Everybody, therefore, who knows the strong feeling of the Chinese for their own teachers, will admit that nothing more efficient could be found in order to fix the dogmas of the Christian religion in the mind of the Chinese than the demonstration that these dogmas agree with their own books. The study, therefore, and the translation of this singular book (the Tao-te-king) would prove most useful to the missionaries, in order to bring to a happy issue the desired gathering in of the Apostolic harvest.”
What followed is so extraordinary that, though it has often been related, it deserves to be related again, more particularly as the whole problem which was supposed to have been solved once for all by M. Stanislas Julien, has of late been opened again by Dr. von Strauss, in the “Journal of the German Oriental Society,” 1869.
There is a passage at the beginning of the fourteenth chapter of the Tao-te-king in which Father Amyot felt certain that the three Persons of the Trinity could be recognized. He translated it:—
“He who is as it were visible but cannot be seen is called Khi.
“He whom we cannot hear, and who does not speak to our ear, is called Hi.
“He who is as it were tangible, but cannot be touched, is called Wei.”
Few readers, I believe, would have been much startled by this passage, or would have seen in it what Father Amyot saw. But more startling revelations were in store. The most celebrated Chinese scholar of his time, Abel Rémusat, took up the subject; and after showing that the first of the three names had to be pronounced, not Khi, but I, he maintained that the three syllables I Hi Wei, were meant for Je-ho-vah. According to him, the three characters employed in this name have no meaning in Chinese; they are only signs of sounds foreign to the Chinese language; and they were intended to render the Greek Ἰαῶ, the name which, according to Diodorus Siculus, the Jews gave to their God. Rémusat goes on to remark that Lao-tse had really rendered this Hebrew name more accurately than the Greeks, because he had preserved the aspiration of [pg 132] the second syllable, which was lost in Greek. In fact, he entertained no doubt that this word, occurring in the work of Lao-tse, proves an intellectual communication between the West and China, in the sixth century B. C.
Fortunately, the panic created by this discovery did not last long. M. Stanislas Julien published in 1842 a complete translation of this difficult book; and here all traces of the name of Jehovah have disappeared.