WORDS.

“I am not so lost in lexicography as to forget that words are the daughters of earth, and that things are the sons of Heaven.”

                                                                                                                                          – Samuel Johnson.

     “WORDS,” says Bishop Berkeley, “have ruined and overrun all the sciences.

     “To view the deformity of error we need only undress it,” that is, deprive it of its verbal disguises.

     “Howbeit that was not first which is spiritual, but that which is natural; and afterward that which is spiritual.” – 1 Cor. 15:46.

     This is true, not only of things, but of words which represent things. Πνεύμα, pneuma, spirit, in its primary meaning signifies wind, air, the air we breathe.

     Κήρυξ, kerux, preacher, was a herald, who summoned the assembly and preserved order in it.

     Απόστολος, apostolos, apostle, was one sent, a messenger, envoy, ambassador.

     Πρέσβυς, presbus, Πρεσβύτερος, presbuteros, elder, older, in the comparative degree, was one older than the most – one of mature years.

     ΄Επίσκοπος, episkopos, bishop, was an overseer, watcher, guardian.

     Διάκονος, diakonos, deacon, a servant, waiting man or woman. The word is of common gender.

     So we might go through with all the ecclesiastical terms of the New Testament. They all had, primarily, a secular meaning. But when it is evident that a writer gives to a word a special, secondary meaning, we must not in his writings, take that word in anyplace in its primary meaning, unless the connection absolutely requires that we should. To do so, in order to support a theory, is highly improper. It can never be done in the interests of truth.

     To make a word mean one thing in one passage, and then something else in essentially the same connection, for the purpose of making the writer support our views, violates the principles of right interpretation. Locke says: “In all discourses wherein one man pretends to instruct or convince another, he should use the same word constantly in the same sense. If this were done (which nobody can refuse without disingenuity), many of the controversies in dispute would be at an end.”⁸

     But where it is clear that a word is used in its primary signification we should so understand it. Thus the word έκκλεσία, ecclesia, church, primarily, assembly, is found in the New Testament 115 times. It is properly translated church in all places except in Acts19:32, 39, 41, where it evidently has its original meaning of Assembly.

     “Fidelity in names,” says Tertullian, “secures the safe appreciation of properties.”

     Words are arbitrary signs of ideas or of things. And often the same word represents things which have no relation to each other. The mother who brings up her children to obey her is sometimes obliged to use the switch upon the refractory child. The railroad man, by turning the switch wrong, wrecked the train. The fashionable woman when she buys a switch is careful to have it match her own hair.

     The farmer cuts his wheat with a cradle. His wife rocks the baby in a cradle.

     These illustrations show that in ascertaining the meaning of a word we must look at the connection in which it stands.

     In our quotations we shall endeavor to give to words the signification intended by those who used them.

     Unless we give to words their true meaning we cannot arrive at the truth for which we search. “I shall urge upon you,” says Archbishop Trench, “how well it will repay you to study the words which you are in the habit of using or of meeting, be they such as relate to highest spiritual things, or the common words of the shop and the market, and of all the familiar intercourse of life. It will indeed repay you far better than you can easily believe.”

     “The study of words,” says Max Muller, “may be tedious to the schoolboy, as breaking of stones is to the wayside laborer: but to the thoughtful eye of the geologist these stones are full of interest; he sees miracles on the high road and reads chronicles in every ditch. Language, too, has marvels of her own, which she unveils to the inquiring glance of the patient student. There are chronicles below her surface; there are sermons in every word.”