Herbert Spencer has beautifully said: “But amid the mysteries, which become the more mysterious the more they are thought about, there will remain the one absolute certainty that man is ever in presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy, from which all things proceed.” The felt and the seen have their fulness in the unseen and intangible, and the visible impels us to seek its counterpart and complement in the invisible. II. _Our Faith in Religion remains_.—And here the question comes up, What is religion? The commonly-accepted meaning of the word is as derived from the Latin _religare_, which means “to bind back or to bind fast.” We do not accept the definition, because it is suggestive of _bondage_. It implies a previous harmonious relation with God which had been lost. It favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and man’s alleged reinstatement and “binding back” to the divine allegiance, through what is called, in theological parlance, a “redemptive scheme.” It is a significant fact that Lactantius, a theologian of the early part of the fourth century, was the first to apply the word religion to “the bond of piety by which we are bound to God.” Augustine of the fifth century followed his example, and so did Servius about the same time; and their example has been followed by theologians ever since, presumably because it favors the dogmas of the fall of Adam and the redemption by Christ. But the highest classical authorities derive the word religion from _relegere_ or _religere_, signifying “to go through or over and over again in reading, speech, or thought—to review carefully and faithfully to ponder and reflect with conscientious fidelity.” Cicero must have understood the original meaning and origin of the Latin word, and he took this view of the subject. He lived more than three hundred years before Lactantius, and he said: “But they who carefully meditated, and as it were considered and reconsidered all those things which pertained to the worship of the gods, were called religious, from religere.” The word _religio_ was in common use in ancient Rome in the sense of _scruple_, implying the consciousness of a natural obligation wholly irrespective of the gods. The oldest popular meanings of the word _religion_ were _faithfulness, sincerity, veracity, honor, punctiliousness, and conscientiousness_.*(1) Religion, then, in its true meaning, is the great fact of _duty_, of _oughtness_ or _right-fulness_, of _conscience_ and _moral sense_. Its great business is to seek conformity to one’s highest ideal. It consists in an _honest and persistent effort by all appropriate means to realize ideal excellence and to transform into actual character and practical life._ (1) See _A Study of Religion_, by Francis E. Abbot.