And if Sir James remains satisfied with his charge that in putting such a theory we "flatter the vanity of the vulgar," we may be permitted to ask him which line of propaganda is likeliest to appeal to the multitude. Let him, in his turn, be on his guard against the vulgarity which seeks support in science from popular prejudice. As to his pronouncement that the theory which he so inexpensively attacks "will find no favour with the philosophic historian," one must just point out that it does not lie with him to draw up the conclusions of philosophic history outside of his own great department, or even, for that matter, in that department. His own historical generalizations, when they seek to pass from the strictly anthropological to the sociological status, will often really not bear the slightest critical analysis. They express at times an entire failure to realize the nature of a historical process, offering as they do mere chance speculations which patently conflict with the whole mass of the evidence he has himself collected. It is not an isolated opinion that by such abortive attempts at "philosophic history" he has tended to lessen the usefulness even of that collection, for which all students are his grateful debtors. In short, he would do well to turn from his ill-timed incursion into dogmatics to the relevant problem which he has forced upon so many of his readers--namely, What has become of his mythological maxim that the ritual precedes the myth? While the professed mythologist rejects the application of the myth theory to the current religion in the name of "philosophic history," students ostensibly more concerned about religion reject the historicity theory in the name of their religious ideals, finding in the myth theory the vindication of these. Thus Professor Drews has from the first connected the argument of his Das Christusmythe with a claim to regenerate religion by freeing it from anthropomorphism; and I have seen other theistic pronouncements to the same effect; to say nothing of the declarations of scholarly Churchmen that for them the Jesus of the Gospels is a God or nothing, and that for them the historicity argument has no religious value. Such positions seem to me, equation for equation, very sufficiently to balance the bias of Sir James Frazer. For my own part, I am content to maintain the theory in the name of science, and it is by scientific tests that I invite the reader to try it. CONCLUSION