Article September 12, 1908 Issue

RELIGION

JEAN DE FOREST-KRIDLER

Our attention has recently been called to a remark by the late Professor Huxley, that it is probably impossible to find an acceptable definition of the world religion. Consulting the Century Dictionary, we find the root of the world to be the Latin noun religio. According to Servius, Augustine, and others, also the common modern view, our word is taken from the verb religare,—re, meaning back, ligare, meaning to bind: literally, to bind back.

Quoting further from the Century, "Words of religious use are especially liable to lose their literal meanings, and to take on the aspect of sacred primitives, making it difficult to trace or impossible to prove their original meaning or formation." We have accepted the French word religion,—into which had grown the meaning of right relations and harmonious expression of the spiritual idea. In the epistle of James we read, "Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this, To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction and to keep himself unspotted from the world." In our text-book, "Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures" (p. 20), Mrs. Eddy says, "The truth is the center of all religion." And again (p. 67), "The epoch approaches when the understanding of the truth of being will be the basis of true religion."

It thus appears that religion means the scientific understanding of our right relation to God, the Principle of creation, to all creation, and the harmonious expression of that understanding. We shall be greatly helped in gaining this scientific or provable understanding by a careful study of our great Wayshower's command, "Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy mind;" and Mrs. Eddy's comment thereon, in which she says, "This command includes much, even the surrender of all merely material sensation, affection, and worship. This is the E1 Dorado of Christianity" (Science and Health, p. 9).

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