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 second-hand 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 personal 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 secondary 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 TO WHATEVER THEY MAY CONSIDER THE DIVINE. Since the relation
may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of
reli