ut 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 center 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."

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