The history of word-development often runs parallel with the progress of human thinking. To trace the origin and history of words, therefore, is often to throw light on the evolution of human concepts.
Prof. Max Muller in his book on the Science of Language gives an example of this when he traces the various branchings of an ancient Indo-European word-root, which became in Sanskrit anh, meaning "to choke," hence ahi, meaning "throttling serpent," and anhas, meaning "sin." Professor Muller shows also how this same ancient root branched into the Latin angor, meaning "suffocation"; into agos, the Greek word for "sin"; into the Gothic agis, meaning "fear"; and finally into the English words, "awful," "ugly," "anger," "anxiety," and "anguish." Commenting on two of the oldest known branches of this ancient fear-connoting root,—namely the Sanskrit word for "throttling serpent" and its derivative which means "sin,"—Professor Muller aptly says, "All who have seen and contemplated the statue of Laocoon and his sons, with the serpent coiled round them from head to foot, may realize what those ancients felt and saw when they called sin 'anhas,' or the throttler."
It is hardly necessary, however, for most of those who are going through the ordinary human experiences to look upon the Laocoon group in order to picture sin as a throttler or choker of love, life, and happiness but it is interesting to find that, even philologically considered, the root of sin branches out into anger, anguish, and anxiety, indulgences of feeling which moderns had condoned as natural to men, until Christian Science stripped off their disguise and exposed them in all their naked display of faithlessness and distrust of God's goodness and allness.
