acting in the matter of punishment merely as the instrument of God;
and after his great victory and the establishment of his own line, it
was to God that he rendered thanks.
No Devil, No Hell.--In this primitive monotheism, of which only
scanty, but no doubt genuine, records remain, no place was found for
any being such as the Buddhist Mara or the Devil of the Old and New
Testaments. God inflicted His own punishments by visiting calamities
on mankind, just as He bestowed His own rewards by sending bounteous
harvests in due season. Evil spirits were a later invention, and their
operations were even then confined chiefly to tearing people's hearts
out, and so forth, for their own particular pleasure; we certainly
meet no cases of evil spirits wishing to undermine man's allegiance to
God, or desiring to make people wicked in order to secure their
everlasting punishment. The vision of Purgatory, with all its horrid
tortures, was introduced into China by Buddhism, and was subsequently
annexed by the Taoists, some time between the third and sixth
centuries A.D.
Chinese Terms for God.--Before passing to the firmer ground,
historically speaking, of the Chou dynasty, it may be as well to state
here that there are two terms in ancient Chinese literature which seem
to be used indiscriminately for God. One is /T'ien/, which has come to
include the material heavens, the sky; and the other is /Shang Ti/,
which has come to include the spirits of deceased Emperors. These two
terms appear simultaneously, so to speak, in the earliest documents
which have come down to us, dating back to something like the
twentieth century before Christ. Priority, however, belongs beyond all
doubt to /T'ien/, which it would have been more natural to find
meaning, first the visible heavens, and secondly the Deity, whose
existence beyond the sky would be inferred from such phenomena as
lightning, thunder, wind, and rain. But the process appears to have
been the other way, so far at any rate as the written language is
concerned. The Chinese script, when it first came into existence, was
purely pictorial, and confined to visible objects which were
comparatively easy to depict. There does not seem to have been any
attempt to draw a picture of the sky. On the other hand, the character
/T'ien/ was just such a representation of a human being as would be
expected from the hand of a prehistoric artist; and under this
unmistakable shape the character appears on bells and tripods, as seen
in collections of inscriptions, so late as the sixth and seventh
centuries B.C., after which the head is flattered to a line, and the
arms are raised until they form another line parallel to that of the
head.
Distinction between T'ien and Shang Ti.--The term /Shang Ti/ means
literally Supreme Ruler. It is not quite so vague as /T'ien/, which
seems to be more of an abstraction, while /Shang Ti/ is a genuinely
personal God. Reference to /T'ien/ is usually associated with fate or
destiny, calamities, blessings, prayers for help, etc. The
commandments of /T'ien/ are hard to obey; He is compassionate, to be
feared, unjust, and cruel. /Shang Ti/ lives in heaven, walks, leaves
tracks on the ground, enjoys the sweet savour of sacrifice, approves
or disapproves of conduct, deals with rewards and punishments in a
more particular way, and comes more actually into touch with the human
race.
Thus /Shang Ti/ would be the God who walked in the garden in the cool
of the day, the God who smelled the sweet savour of Noah's sacrifice,