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THE VARIETIES OF RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE
religion shall consist in for the purpose of these lectures, or, out of
the many meanings of the word, from choosing the one meaning
in which I wish to interest you particularly, and proclaiming arbi-
trarily that when I say “religion” I mean that. This, in fact, is what
I must do, and I will now preliminarily seek to mark out the field
I choose.
One way to mark it out easily is to say what aspects of the
subject we leave out. At the outset we are struck by one great
partition which divides the religious field. On the one side of it lies
institutional, on the other personal religion. As M. P. Sabatier
says, one branch of religion keeps the divinity, another keeps man
most in view. Worship and sacrifice, procedures for working on the
dispositions of the deity, theology and ceremony and ecclesiastical
organization, are the essentials of religion in the institutional branch.
Were we to limit our view to it, we should have to define religion
as an external art, the art of winning the favor of the gods. In the
more personal branch of religion it is on the contrary the inner
dispositions of man himself which form the centre of interest, his
conscience, his deserts, his helplessness, his incompleteness. And
although the favor of the God, as forfeited or gained, is still an
essential feature of the story, and theology plays a vital part therein,
yet the acts to which this sort of religion prompts are personal not
ritual acts, the individual transacts the business by himself alone,
and the ecclesiastical organization, with its priests and sacraments
and other go-betweens, sinks to an altogether secondary place. The
relation goes direct from heart to heart, from soul to soul, between
man and his maker.
Now in these lectures I propose to ignore the institutional branch
entirely, to say nothing of the ecclesiastical organization, to consider
as little as possible the systematic theology and the ideas about the
gods themselves, and to confine myself as far as I can to personal
religion pure and simple. To some of you personal religion, thus
nakedly considered, will no doubt seem too incomplete a thing to
wear the general name. “It is a part of religion,” you will say, “but
only its unorganized rudiment; if we are to name it by itself, we had
better call it man’s conscience or morality than his religion. The
name ‘religion’ should be reserved for the fully organized system of
feeling, thought, and institution, for the Church, in short, of which
this personal religion, so called, is but a fractional element.”
CIRCUMSCRIPTION OF THE TOPIC
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But if you say this, it will only show the more plainly how much
the question of definition tends to become a dispute about names.
Rather than prolong such a dispute, I am willing to accept almost
any name for the personal religion of which I propose to treat. Call
it conscience or morality, if you yourselves prefer, and not religion
— under either name it will be equally worthy of our study. As for
myself, I think it will prove to contain some elements which morality
pure and simple does not contain, and these elements I shall soon
seek to point out; so I will myself continue to apply the word “religion”
to it; and in the last lecture of all, I will bring in the theologies and
the ecclesiasticisms, and say something of its relation to them.
In one sense at least the personal religion will prove itself more
fundamental than either theology or ecclesiasticism. Churches,
when once established, live at secondhand upon tradition; but the
founders of every church owed their power originally to the fact of
their direct personal communion with the divine. Not only the
superhuman founders, the Christ, the Buddha, Mahomet, but all
the originators of Christian sects have been in this case; — so per-
sonal religion should still seem the primordial thing, even to those
who continue to esteem it incomplete.
There are, it is true, other things in religion chronologically more
primordial than personal devoutness in the moral sense. Fetishism
and magic seem to have preceded inward piety historically — at
least our records of inward piety do not reach back so far. And
if fetishism and magic be regarded as stages of religion, one may
say that personal religion in the inward sense and the genuinely
spiritual ecclesiasticisms which it founds are phenomena of second-
ary or even tertiary order. But, quite apart from the fact that many
anthropologists — for instance, Jevons and Frazer — expressly
oppose “religion” and “magic” to each other, it is certain that the
whole system of thought which leads to magic, fetishism, and
the lower superstitions may just as well be called primitive science
as called primitive religion. The question thus becomes a verbal
one again; and our knowledge of all these early stages of thought
and feeling is in any case so conjectural and imperfect that farther
discussion would not be worth while.
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall
mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in
their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation