e
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
esteem it incomplete.[1]

[Footnote 1: James: _Varieties of Religious Experience_, p. 30.]

Before we examine the social institutions and fixed apparatus
of ritual and of reasoned theology in which the religious
experience has become variously embodied, we must pause to
analyze the experience itself. To be religious, as a personal
experience, is, like being philosophical, to take a total attitude
toward the universe. But the religious attitude is one of a
somewhat specific kind. It is, one may arbitrarily but also
somewhat fairly say, to sense or comprehend one's relation to
the divine, however the divine be conceived. It is to have this
sense and comprehension not only deeply, as one might in a
poetic or a philosophical mood, but to have it suffused with
reverence. We shall presently see that the objects of veneration
have had a different meaning for different individuals,
groups, and generations. But whatever be the conception of
the divine object, the religious attitude seems to have this
stable feature. It is always an awed awareness on the part
of the individual of his relation to that "something not himself,"
and larger than himself, with whom the destinies of the
universe seem to rest. This somehow sensed relation to the
divine appears throughout all the varieties of religion that
have appeared in the world, and among many individuals not
popularly accounted religious.

It is just such an experience, for example, that Wordsworth
expresses when he says in the "Lines Written Above Tintern
Abbey":

"... And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused,
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man;
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things."

It is the same sense that comes over so-called worldly people
when oppressed suddenly by a great sorrow, or uplifted
by a sudden great joy, an awareness of a divine power that
moves masterfully and mysteriously through the events of
life, provoking on the part of finite creatures a strange and
compell