 Religion as a systematic entity, as it emerged in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, is a concept of polemics and apologetics.By way of an etymological study of "religion" (, in Latin), Smith further contends that the term, which at first and for most of the centuries denoted an attitude towards a relationship between God and "man", has through conceptual slippage come to mean a "system of observances or beliefs", a historical tradition which has been institutionalized through a process of reification.Whereas "religio" denoted personal piety, "religion" came to refer to an abstract entity (or transcendental signifier) which, Smith says, does not exist.