Article October 26, 1918 Issue

There is never any particular advantage to be gained by...

The Christian Science Monitor

There is never any particular advantage to be gained by chasing the meaning of words through a dictionary, words, that is to say, which are found in the Bible. It may be an interesting thing to do, but that is altogether another matter. In any case it is commonly a great waste of time, for the exact meaning can always be found, unerringly, by the test of the spiritual meaning of the text.

Take the word righteousness, for instance; it does not in the least matter what the meaning of the word was in the tenth century, much less in the original Old English. The question is what did it mean in the Elizabethan English into which the King James translation was made, for that should be the true equivalent of the Greek. If, indeed, the student is going to more original sources, he must trace the word in the Greek text to its meaning in the Greek language at the time that the first gospel was written. And this will next necessitate his deciding the date of the manuscript, and after that the equivalent of the Greek, not in the ordinary literature of the country, but in that bastard Greek, with the boatman's idiom, called koine, in which the four gospels were written. By that time the searcher will probably have come to the conclusion that it is safer to trust to his own spiritual perception for enlightenment.

As a matter of fact, the word righteousness is a very simple example. However you trace its meaning you will always come back to the same place. It may originally, in the Greek, have meant justice, in the sense of judging righteous or true judgment but it, in any case, meant observance of the rules of right or uprightness, which it so happens is something very near the meaning of the Old English word itself. Righteousness, then, is rightness; it is observance of Principle or Truth. It therefore naturally follows that those who hunger and thirst after it will, as Jesus declared, in the Sermon on the Mount, be filled. For Jesus also declared that those who knew the truth would be freed by the truth.

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