To this heaven other names are given, even in the oldest writings--Ti, Ruler; or Shang-ti, Supreme Ruler. Did the Chinese conceive this ruler as identical with heaven, or as a personality dwelling in it or above it? It has been held that the two beliefs are not the same; that the Chinese of the earliest times worshipped the Supreme Ruler, _i.e._ the one God, Ti, and afterwards fell away from that position of pure monotheism and declined to the worship of the material object, heaven. The early Catholic missionaries argued that the Chinese Shang-ti was equivalent to the Christian "God," and signified a being other than the sky, the Supreme Power of the universe. The Chinese, however, generally denied that they made any such distinction,[2] and even declared that they could not understand it. The names Heaven and Supreme Ruler are used by them indiscriminately: one notices that Confucius does not use the personal form, but only speaks of heaven; "heaven," he says, when feeling distressed, "is destroying me." We have here, therefore, an early form of nature-worship. [Footnote 2: Dr. Legge, while admitting that the Chinese originally worshipped the vault of heaven itself, maintains that they got past the early mode of thought which considers every natural object as animated, before the dawn of history, and became pure theists, believers in a supreme spiritual being. Confucius he considers to have held a lower religious position than his countrymen had already attained to. He also regards the worship of spirits and of ancestors as a later perversion and degradation of the original religion of one god. In these positions he is followed by Professor Giles, _Oxford Proceedings_, vol. i. p. 105, _sqq._]