Faith & Spirit Quote by Ernest Holmes

Holmes is calling out a quiet scandal: that Christianity can function less like a living ethic and more like a locked cabinet, its keys mislabeled. The line is built on a double accusation. First, “words that are misleading” suggests not mere confusion but semantic drift and institutional self-protection - doctrines flattened into slogans, metaphors taken as literal mechanics, ancient vocabulary (“salvation,” “sin,” “kingdom”) repurposed as moral accounting. Second, “symbols that but few understand” targets the insider economy of religion: sacraments, creeds, and ritual gestures that are supposed to disclose meaning, yet often operate as cultural badges. You can “belong” without comprehension, which is exactly Holmes’s point.

Context matters. Holmes, a leading voice in Religious Science/New Thought, spent his career translating Christian language into a metaphysical psychology of mind, healing, and spiritual law. From that angle, Christianity isn’t being dismissed; it’s being edited. He implies the tradition’s “real meaning” is accessible, but it has been buried under inherited phrasing and opaque iconography - a critique aimed as much at clergy and theologians as at lay practice. The subtext is reformist and mildly subversive: if the essential truth is hidden, authority shifts from gatekeepers to interpreters, from doctrine to direct insight.

The sentence works because it’s both respectful and destabilizing. It grants Christianity depth (“real meaning”) while implying that what most people encounter is a misdirection - not a lie, exactly, but a fog machine. Holmes isn’t asking readers to abandon faith; he’s inviting them to suspect the packaging and go hunting for the contents.