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 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