There are, however, certain peculiar difficulties in the study of the religious experience. Most men are by training emotionally committed to one particular religious creed which it is very difficult for them impartially to examine or to compare with others. In the second place, there is a confusion in the minds of most people between the personal religious experience, and the formal and external institution we commonly have in mind when we speak of "religion." When we ordinarily use the term, we imply a set of dogmas, an institution, a reasoned theology, a ritual, a priesthood, all the apparatus and earmarks of institutionalized religion. We think of Christianity, Mohammedanism, Judaism, the whole welter of churches and creeds that have appeared in the history of mankind. But these are rather the outward vehicles and vestments of the religious experience than the experience itself. They are the social expressions and external instruments of the inner spiritual occurrence. But the latter is primary. If man had not _first been religious_, these would never have arisen. In the words of William James:
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 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.