Mr. Lang has followed up his Making of Religion by a revision of his brilliant refutation of Professor Max Müller and the philological method of expounding mythology, with the object of bringing it into harmony with his later opinions. Readers of the original edition will be glad of the opportunity of reading the book again, and of noting the changes made in it. Here, I think, they will be disappointed. The old arguments are for the most part still valid, but some of them have been weakened by the concessions Mr. Lang has thought it necessary to make, and the limitations already there have been marked and extended in a way that sometimes embarrasses the main position, if it does not deliver the author into his opponents' hands. Moreover, little account has been taken of the progress of inquiry during the last twelve years, fruitful as they have been in many directions. Mr. Lang would, I think, have done better to re-write the book, taking into account the results of discussion on the various points first attacked so trenchantly and successfully by him. Science is ever moving forward, and it is always inconvenient and sometimes dangerous to reprint a work which even, like this, at the time of its appearance constituted a great and significant advance on all that had been previously done. The ideas and the arguments of Myth, Ritual, and Religion, many of them novel when it was published, have now become by virtue of their very strength commonplaces of science. Our indebtedness to them is so great that we do not recognise it; and when we come to read them over again, something of their old force is apt to evaporate if they have not been brought up to date. But these drawbacks notwithstanding, the book is and will remain a standard authority on the origins of mythology and a sample of the solvent power of criticism.
As the preface to the new edition consists to some extent of a further reply to my strictures on The Making of Religion, I need not apologise for taking the opportunity to make a short rejoinder.
Religion is one of the most difficult words in the scientific vocabulary to define; but for Mr. Lang's argument as now developed its definition is essential. He defines it for the purpose
