I begin with this question:--What do people mean in a Christian land by the word _'religion?'_ My purpose is not to propound any metaphysical problem; I wish only, in the plainest possible sense, to ask, and to have an answer, upon this one point--how much is understood by that obscure term,* _'religion,'_ when used by a Christian? Only I am punctilious upon one demand, viz., that the answer shall be comprehensive. We are apt in such cases to answer elliptically, omitting, because silently presuming as understood between us, whatever _seems_ obvious. To prevent _that_, we will suppose the question to be proposed by an emissary from some remote planet,--who, knowing as yet absolutely nothing of us and our intellectual differences, must insist (as _I_ insist) upon absolute precision, so that nothing essential shall be wanting, and nothing shall be redundant. *[Footnote: '_That obscure term;_'--i. e. not obscure as regards the use of the term, or its present value, but as regards its original _genesis_, or what in civil law is called the _deductio_. Under what angle, under what aspect, or relation, to the field which it concerns did the term _religion_ originally come forward? The general field, overlooked by religion, is the ground which lies between the spirit of man and the supernatural world. At present, under the humblest conception of religion, the human spirit is supposed to be interested in such a field by the conscience and the nobler affections, But I suspect that originally these great faculties were absolutely excluded from the point of view. Probably the relation between spiritual _terrors_ and man's power of propitiation, was the problem to which the word _religion_ formed the answer. Religion meant apparently, in the infancies of the various idolatries, that _latreia_, or service of sycophantic fear, by which, as the most approved method of approach, man was able to conciliate the favor, or to buy off the malice of supernatural powers. In all Pagan nations, it is probable that religion would, an the whole, be a degrading influence; although I see, even for such nations, two cases, at the least, where the uses of a religion would be indispensable; viz. for the sanction of _oaths_, and as a channel for gratitude not pointing to a human object. If so, the answer is easy: religion _was_ degrading: but heavier degradations would have arisen from irreligion. The noblest of all idolatrous peoples, viz. the Romans, have left deeply scored in their very use of their word _religlo_, their testimony to the degradation wrought by any religion that Paganism could yield. Rarely indeed is this word employed, by a Latin author, in speaking of an individual, without more or less of sneer. Reading that word, in a Latin book, we all try it and ring it, as a petty shopkeeper rings a half-crown, before we venture to receive it as offered in good faith and loyalty. Even the Greeks are nearly in the same άπορια, when they wish to speak of religiosity in