and Gillen that in Central Australia the very rite required was to-day in full force. Why, then, has the slain god broken completely with the totemic victim? Partly, no doubt, because Dr. Frazer's further researches into totemism, which were destined ultimately to fill the massive volumes of his 'Totemism and Exogamy,' were leading him to lay more stress on the social side of the institution, and less on what he had at first termed its 'religious' side; partly, too, because his slain god had vegetable affinities which he found hard to relate to any form of the blood-sacrifice. Surely, however, the most cogent reason of all was that it was impossible, if he wished to maintain his hard-and-fast distinction between magic and religion, to allow the totemism or the sacramentalism of his typical representatives of the age of magic' to be religious in any way whatsoever. At the time when the first edition saw the light, Dr. Frazer, as he tells us in so many words, was disposed to class magic loosely under religion as one of its lower forms. Hence to derive a god from a totem, and worship from a sacramental meal, was at this stage of his thought the most natural thing in the world. Afterwards, he cuts off magic from religion as if with a hatchet.' The inevitable result is that totems and gods find themselves ranged on opposite sides of a conceptual hiatus. As for the sacrament of communion, it must be rated a form of magic, the survival of which as the central mystery of the religion of the civilised world is, to say the least, an odd coincidence.

But if the slain god, being an affair of religion, cannot be derived any longer from the sacrifice of a totemic animal, nor, presumably, from any operation of vegetation-magic, is his origin to be sought in that slaying of the king, about which Dr. Frazer has amassed so many interesting and novel particulars? Let us note in passing how a sagacious use of the comparative method is apt to be crowned with what amounts to a gift of divination, so accurately is the course of future discovery foretold. Just as Robertson Smith anticipated the totemic sacrament of the Australians, so no less brilliantly Dr. Frazer described years ago a regicidal philosophy of which the perfect exponents were but the other day discovered by Dr. Seligmann in the Shilluk of the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan. Facts of this kind as facts were very hard to believe at first; and the world has every reason to be grateful to Dr. Frazer

for piling up paradoxical instance upon instance, until the British middle-class, with what Matthew Arnold calls its blood'thirsty love of life,' had to own that there existed other people who regarded the happy despatch as a natural tribute to royalty, and were all agog to take office with the certain prospect of martyrdom at the next election. But does the theory therewith supplied fit the important facts in question? If the slain god is to be correlated with the slain king, the king must first be proved divine. This can be done of course, after a somewhat unconvincing fashion, by making out the king to be possessed by a god or spirit that, being independent of him, enters and confers a purely extrinsic divinity. Now no one would deny that such a theory of possession is perfectly compatible with savage notions. But is it the sole theory applicable to this group of facts, and will it cover all of them? It is, to say the least, suspicious that chiefs and kings should be intrinsically tabu. Surely this almost universal sacredness of theirs, which moreover is often a quality held to be transmissible to their descendants and successors, is not wholly distinct in nature from the divinity attributed to certain chiefs and kings in particular. But Dr. Frazer, having defined tabu as a negative magic, becomes once more the victim of his own logical hatchet. The sacred which is not divine and the sacred which is divine are by definition cut off from each other, and that one should pass into the other is therefore inconceivable; even if this process should appear to occur, as, awkwardly enough, it does.

It would be possible to illustrate in many another way the disastrous consequences of this root-fallacy consisting in the refusal to recognise a non-theistic type of religion; but criticism has been carried far enough, and it is only fair, in conclusion, to express, however inadequately, a grateful sense of all that Dr. Frazer's great work has done to consolidate and advance anthropological science. Even if Dr. Frazer has on theoretical grounds predicated discontinuity, where the facts proclaim continuity, in regard to the religious history of man, he has at any rate by the comprehensiveness of his survey set those facts together in visible juxtaposition, if not always in intelligible interconnexion. We work backwards and forwards between the rites of the peasant farmers of Europe, modern or classical, and those of the savage hunters

of the darker continents, and it matters little whether we are bidden to class some as invocations and others as incantations so long as we are made to realise that the same childlike cry of the human soul, May we have day by day our daily bread,' is expressed throughout, whether manually or orally, whether through this set of symbols or through that. Moreover, we are shown that the hope of man rests chiefly on the experience of the ever-present mystery of renewal. In his own life, and in the life of nature, death is balanced and even outbalanced by birth, vital loss by vital increase. Now the key to the mystery of renewal lies partly without in the discovery of scientific appliances, but mainly within in the discovery how to maintain a strong heart. That practical philosophy of life which is human religion could never afford to make the mistake of putting the machines before the strong heart, for the simple reason that societies that trusted to the machines rather than to the men behind the machines have abandoned their chance of renewal and gone down in death. Savages and simple folk of all sorts can teach our so-called civilisation an important lesson, inasmuch as their view of the universe regularly puts the moral aspect above the mechanical. It is shallow to regard the totemic ritual of Australia as a sort of science of stock-raising gone wrong. What you have first to learn in the deserts of Australia is how to go without your dinner on occasions, and nevertheless to fare on bravely until you find one. Having by the aid of your rites made yourself 'strong' and 'glad' and 'good,' then you get good hunting as a matter of course; and even then you have the decency and the sound sense to ascribe your good fortune, not to yourself, but to the higher powers that are with and in you, yet are never merely you. Religion has been intellectualised as civilisation has advanced; but whether the human heart has been moralised in like proportion is not so certain. At any rate the savage, or the little child, may have something to teach the doctors, if the latter incline. to suppose that theology is, equivalent to religion, or are tempted to forget that knowledge is but the servant of desire and hope and faith.

'The Golden Bough,' more than any other book, has taught our generation to view the religious world as a whole-a world full of sad confusion, it may be, yet none the less charac

teristically our own. To Dr. Frazer, who has laboured to such splendid purpose, our deepest gratitude is due; for by the magic of his pen he has made the myriad facts live, so that they tell their own tale, and we are left free to read their meaning as our several tastes and temperaments dictate. Straining hard at the desk he has perhaps at times felt in his own person the burden of existence, and has to that extent become sympathetically conscious of the dead weight of folly and ignorance that has ever lain on the shoulders of the human pilgrim and helped to keep his eyes towards the ground. Yet Dr. Frazer has endured and won his way through to our lasting benefit. So too then man has endured and won on; and that fact, after all, shows something better than folly and ignorance to have been there all along to help him on his way.

R. R. MARETT.

Edited by Margaret de G. Verrall. Cambridge University
Press. 1914.

3. Notes of a Son and Brother. By HENRY JAMES. Macmillan. 1914.

4. Walt Whitman: a Critical Study. By BASIL de Sélincourt

Secker. 1914.

5. A Song of Honour. By RALPH HODGSON.

1914.

'Flying Fame.'

6. New Numbers. By WILFRID WILSON GIBSON, RUPERT BROOKE, LASCELLES ABERCROMBIE, and JOHN DRINKWATER. (Published at Ryton, Dymock, Gloucester.) 1914.

7. The Collected Poems of Margaret L. Woods.

John Lane. 1914. 8. Cathay and the Way Thither. Translated by Sir HENRY YULE. New Edition by HENRI CORDIER. Vol. II. Odoric of Pordenone. The Hakluyt Society. 1913.

MR. WILFRID WARD in 'Men and Matters' confronts his

readers, bearing a standard in one hand and a branch of olive in the other. His attitude is conciliatory, his text moderation. There is none the less a definite point, alike in religious and political controversy, when, in his judgment, conciliation must be surrendered for a steadfast insistence upon conviction, when moderation tends only to weakness.

The most important of the fourteen papers contained in this volume are concerned with the polity of the Roman and Catholic Church. They deal with questions comprehensively discussed in Mr. Fawkes's 'Essays in Modernism.' But while Mr. Fawkes dealt with these questions from the standpoint of the Modernist, independent of, if not in direct conflict with, ecclesiastical authority, Mr. Ward denies the validity of private judgment, and pleads, if not for servile submission to authority, at least for the full recognition and appreciation of the absolute necessity for authority, in matters of faith.