Chapman Cohen was a leading English atheist and secularist writer and lecturer. He was the elder son of Enoch Cohen, a Jewish confectioner, and his wife, Deborah, and in his own words had “little religion at home and none at school”

Cohen moved to London in 1889, and soon became involved in the secularist movement. That year he accepted an invitation to speak against a Christian lecturer and shortly afterwards he was invited to speak the local branch of the National Secular Society (NSS).

After a year of lecturing for the freethought cause, he joined the NSS, becoming a popular and prolific lecturer for the Society. In 1893 Cohen spoke at the Leicester Secular Society. He was elected a vice-president of the NSS in 1895.

In 1897 Cohen began contributing weekly articles to G. W. Foote‘s Freethinker, in 1898 he became assistant editor, and after Foote’s death in 1915 he was appointed editor. Cohen also succeeded Foote as President of the NSS until 1949.

Cohen had written for other freethought journals before joining The Freethinker, and had edited The Truthseeker, owned by J.W. Gott.

Cohen remained editor of The Freethinker until 1951, when he retired and was replaced by Francis Ridley.

On his death, The Times printed a short obituary of Cohen, which said:

He was the author of many books setting forth the freethought philosophy of life, which had a large sale, and he was outstanding as a forthright, witty and courteous debater and lecturer.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Cohen

Thomas Paine

Thomas Paine was an English republican, anticlerical deist and social reformer who became involved in the American and French revolutions.

“The World is my country, all mankind are my brethren, and to do good is my religion.”

Early years

Thomas Pain, as his name was most often spelt before his emigration to the American colonies in 1774, was born in Thetford, Norfolk.

He was apprenticed to his father’s profession of staymaker, which was later a gift to the caricaturists such as James Gilray.

His first marriage, to Mary Lambert, while working as a staymaker at 20 New Street, Sandwich, Kent from 1759 ended in the tragedy of his wife’s death in childbirth. Following the advice of his father-in-law he joined the excisemen and was appointed to a post in Lincolnshire.

His uncovering of corruption however led to his dismissal, and for a while he tried working as a teacher in London.

In 1768 he was reinstated to the excise service and moved to Lewes, in Sussex. His second marriage was to Elizabeth Ollive, the daughter of his landlord at Bull House, High Street, Lewes Sussex. There he attended meetings of the Headstrong Club which met at the White Hart Inn and debated philosophical and political issues. His colleagues called on him to write a petition to the government to improve their pay and conditions. This was his first published pamphlet The Case of the Officers of Excise. However it led once more to his dismissal.

To America and revolution

He resolved to emigrate to the American colonies, and Elizabeth agreed to a separation. He had been fortunate to make the acquaintance of Benjamin Franklin, who was at that time the American representative in London, who was willing to give him a letter of introduction to people of influence in Philadelphia.

Despite becoming severely ill with typhus on the voyage, Paine recovered and found his true vocation as a writer for the Pennsylvania Magazine. Early articles advocated the abolition of slavery and equality for women.

The beginnings of the American revolution (1774-1787) led him to write Common Sense which advocated a complete break from the British monarchy, and the establishment of a republic, and once the struggle was underway he wrote a series of pamphlets The American Crisis, the first of which General Washington ordered to be read to his troops before a crucial battle. He also served as a footsoldier in the war, and was sent to France in 1781 to obtain financial support for the cause. Congress and the State of New York recognized his services by a grant of land at New Rochelle.

In 1787 he returned to England with a view to having his design for an iron bridge built. It was in London, at the premises of the liberal publisher Joseph Johnson that he encountered Mary Wollstonecraft and other radical thinkers and artists like William Godwin, Henry Fuseli, and William Blake.

The French Revolution

The French revolution of 1789, disrupted Paine’s plans. The writings of his former friend Edmund Burke against the revolution, inspired first Mary Wollstonecraft’s Vindicaton of the Rights of Men (1790) and the first part of Paine’s own Rights of Man 1791. Its advocacy of republicanism resulted in the authorities issuing an order for his arrest. According to a possibly apocryphal tale it was William Blake who warned him to escape to France before being charged with treason.

In 1792, Wollstonecraft followed up with her Vindication of the Rights of Women, and the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man anticipated many aspects of the modern welfare state. He allowed it to be printed freely, and although banned the work was read widely and influenced campaigners such as Thomas Hardy of the London Correspondence Society and later Richard Carlile among many others.

In France Paine was elected to the National Convention. There, since he argued against the terror, he fell foul of Robespierre. Despite being seriously ill he was kept in prison, under threat of the guillotine, for nearly a year 1793-4, and was only released when the new American Ambassador James Monroe, petitioned for his release as an American citizen. While in jail he wrote part of his anti-religious work the Age of Reason. The Monroes also nursed him until he recovered, and he retired to his farm the United States in 1802.

In a strange turn of events, his bones were dug up and sent to England by his admirer William Cobbett in 1819, but were somehow lost.

The first memorial to him in England was the bust on the frontage of Leicester’s Secular Hall, erected in 1881. A statue in Thetford was commissioned, with funding from US airmen stationed nearby, in 1963. Another statue was unveiled in Lewes on 4 July 2010.

See also…

• Spartacus Educational biography of Paine
• Selected Writings
• Mark Steel documentary video on Paine
• Video lecture on Paine
• Portraits of Paine at the National Portrait Gallery

William Johnson Fox

William Johnson Fox was a religious and political orator, born near Southwold, Suffolk.

He was trained for the Independent ministry, at Homerton College (then in London). He later seceded to the Unitarians, and in 1817 Fox became minister of a nonconformist congregation which subsequently went on to become the non-religious South Place Ethical Society.

In 1831, Fox bought the journal of the Unitarian Association, The Monthly Repository, of which he was already editor; for five years this was effectively the first ancestor of the Ethical Record, the Society’s current journal.

Among the causes with which Fox identified himself and the Society were the spread of popular education and the repeal of the Corn Laws. From 1847 to 1862 he intermittently represented Oldham in Parliament as a Liberal whilst remaining minister at South Place for several more years.

Also see…

• Wikipedia article on Fox
• History of South Place Ethical Society

Joseph Mccabe

Joseph Martin McCabe was born at 14 Chestergate, Macclesfield, Cheshire, but his family moved to Manchester, near Gorton Monastery, while he was a child. He trained there as a Franciscan Friar from the age of 15.

Father Antony

His novitiate year took place in Killarney, after which he was moved to St Bonaventure’s School, Forest Gate in London. He was ordained as a priest in 1890 and given the name ‘Father Antony’. He studied philosophy at the Catholic University of Louvain for a year, and in 1895 was appointed rector of the newly founded St Bernardine’s College, Buckingham, but he had gradually lost his faith and on Ash Wednesday, 19 February, 1896 he resigned and renounced the church.

He wrote about this period of his life in the first of his many books Twelve Years in a Monastery (1897), and also in a novel In the Shade of the Cloister (1907) published under the name “Arnold Wright”.

Union of Ethical Societies

From 1896 he worked with Stanton Coit and F. J. Gould in the Union of Ethical Societies, founded that year in London, but in 1898 moved to Leicester as secretary of the Secular Society. It was there that he met Beatrice Lee, a hosiery worker, who became his wife. They were married 17 August 1899. He found he was not suited to the pastoral work required of him, and after a year returned to London to become the first director of the Rationalist Press Association (RPA), until 1902.

Many of his earliest works were written for the RPA, including The Life and Letters of George Jacob Holyoake (1908).

Writer and speaker

For the rest of his long life he made a living as a freelancer, writing particularly on the history of the Catholic church. He was also a pioneer in the popularisation of science, with his translation of Ernst Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe (1900), and titles such as Evolution of Mind (1910), The Story of Evolution (1912) and “The Evolution of Civilization” (1922).

McCabe was also in demand as a speaker, and gave 3- 4,000 lectures in his lifetime, making speaking tours in North America and Australia, as well as Great Britain.

In 1925 he and his wife separated, they had raised two sons and two daughters. About the same time he also made a break with the RPA, and from 1926 wrote many works for the American freethought publisher E. Haldeman-Julius in his Blue Book series. Many of these were published in part-work format, accumulating to form a larger work.

McCabe wrote in 1926:

I am what is called a Feminist. Thirty years ago I left a monastery and began a sane human existence. Within two or three years, I find, I was defending the rights of women.

One of his last works was A Rationalist Encyclopaedia (1948). In it he wrote: “The Rationalist case needs no straining of evidence and always gains by the severest self-criticism.” (p.114). It was McCabe who started the controversy over the pro-Catholic censorship of the later editions of Encyclopedia Britannica, which omit sections from the 11th edition that were critical of the church.

McCabe died aged 87 at 22 St George’s Road, Golders Green. The epitaph he requested was: “He was a rebel to his last day.”

Also See…

• Works online (1)
• Works online (2)
• Issac Goldberg’s Joseph McCabe: Fighter For Freethought
• Wikipedia biography of McCabe

Gustav Spiller was a member of the Ethical Societies that preceded the modern Humanist movement. He wrote a number of secular hymns and books including a history of these Societies, and on psychology.

Spiller was a Jew born in Budapest, Hungary but later naturalised as English.

By the late 1880’s Spiller worked for the Labour Office of the League of Nations at Geneva. In 1889 he was part of a meeting (along with F. J. Gould) in Hackney, London to plan an Ethical Society.

In 1908 he organised the First International Moral Education Congress in held in London.

Anti-racist

In 1911 Spiller was lead organiser of the First Universal Races Congress which met in London at the University of London. This was an early effort of anti-racism, at which distinguished speakers from over 50 countries for four days discussed race problems and ways to counter the work of the budding eugenics movement and improve interracial relations. Among the prominent scientists and scholars in attendance are Americans W.E.B. DuBois and anthropologist Franz Boas. Spiller summed up the group’s findings:

We are then under the necessity of concluding that an impartial investigator would be inclined to look upon the various important peoples of the world as, to all intents and purposes, essentially equal in intellect, enterprise, morality and physique.

However, their work fell on deaf ears and had little impact.

Spiller edited the papers from the proceedings of these two symposia. He also wrote numerous books including: The Mind of Man (1902); Faith in Man: the religion of the twentieth century (1908); Hymns of Love and Duty for the Young (1910); The Training of the Child: A Parent’s Manual (1912); A New System of Scientific Procedure (1921); The Ethical Movement in Great Britain (1934); The Origin and Nature of Man (1935). He was author alternative words to Beethoven’s Ode to Joy.

Also See…

• Selected works available online

Francis Sheehy-Skeffington

The Sheehy-Skeffingtons – the feminist and Irish nationalist Hanna Sheehy-Skeffington, her husband, the pacifist, suffragist and writer, Francis, and their son, Owen, a founder member of the Humanist Association or Ireland – were notable Irish atheists.

Hanna and Francis

Born into the Roman Catholic tradition and educated by Dominican nuns and Jesuits, Hanna Sheehy and Francis Skeffington had both already abandoned Catholicism and become avowed atheists when they married in 1903 (they took each other’s surnames as a sign of their shared commitment to gender equality).

When their son was born in 1909 they refused to have him baptised into the Catholic faith, making a public break with their religious backgrounds.

The Sheehy-Skeffingtons were founder members of the Irish Women’s Franchise League and Hanna was imprisoned twice for suffrage militancy in 1912-13.

During the Easter Rising of 1916 the couple were not directly involved in the fighting due to their pacifist principles, but Hanna provided the republican insurgents with food, while Francis formed a group of volunteers to try to stop the looting of businesses in Dublin.

It was while doing this that he was arrested and shot without trial. The officer responsible was court martialed, and a public enquiry followed, but no-one was ever brought to justice.

After Francis’s death, Hanna became more overtly nationalistic in her campaigning against British influence in Ireland, becoming a member of Sinn Féin and being jailed on several occasions for her republican activities. Her feminist activism also continued and she was heavily involved with the Irish Women’s Workers’ Union. She died in Dublin, aged 68.

Owen

Owen Sheehy-Skeffington studied at the École Normale Supérieure and became a lecturer in French at Trinity College, Dublin. After a spell in the Irish Labour Party, he was elected to the Seanad Éireann (Irish Senate) in 1954, after running as a liberal socialist independent.

He shared his parents’ atheism and, as well as being involved in the formation of the Humanist Association of Ireland, he sought to promote secular education in Ireland. He also led a long-running campaign to expose the abuse of children in institutions run by the Irish Christian Brothers and supported the efforts of victims to tell their stories.

Hanna, Francis and Owen are buried in Glasnevin Cemetery, Dublin.

Also see…

• Discovering women in Irish history
• wwww.hannashouse.ie
• Review of ‘Founded On Fear’ by Peter Tyrrell

Olaf Stapleton. Copyright © The University of Adelaide

William Olaf Stapledon was a British philosopher and author of several influential works of science fiction.

Stapledon was born in Seacombe, Wallasey and educated at Abbotsholme School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he acquired a BA in Modern History in 1909 and a MA in 1913.

During World War I he served as a conscientious objector with the Friends’ Ambulance Unit in France and Belgium from July 1915 to January 1919.

Stapledon was awarded a PhD in philosophy from the University of Liverpool in 1925 and used his thesis as the basis for his first published prose book, A Modern Theory of Ethics (1929).

Fiction and activism

However, he soon turned to fiction in the hope of presenting his ideas to a wider public. The relative success of Last and First Men (1930) prompted him to become a full-time writer. He wrote a sequel and followed it up with many more books of both fiction and philosophy.

After 1945 Stapledon travelled widely on lecture tours, visiting the Netherlands, Sweden and France, and in 1948 he spoke at the World Congress of Intellectuals for Peace in Wroc?aw, Poland.

He attended the Conference for World Peace held in New York in 1949, the only Briton to be granted a visa to do so. In 1950 he became involved with the anti-apartheid movement.

Stapledon’s writings directly influenced Arthur C. Clarke, Brian Aldiss, Stanislaw Lem, C. S. Lewis and John Maynard Smith and indirectly influenced many others, contributing many ideas to the world of science fiction.

Ideas

Stapledon was an agnostic who was hostile to religious institutions, but not to religious yearnings.

He wrote many non-fiction books on political and ethical subjects, in which he advocated the growth of “spiritual values”, which he defined as those values expressive of a yearning for greater awareness of the self in a larger context (“personality-in-community”).

A sudden death

After a week of lectures in Paris, he cancelled a projected trip to Yugoslavia and returned to his home in Caldy, where he died very suddenly of a heart attack.

Stapledon was cremated at Landican Crematorium, and then his widow and their children scattered his ashes on the sandy cliffs overlooking the Dee Estuary, a favourite spot of his that features in more than one of his books.

The University of Liverpool now houses the Olaf Stapledon archive.

Also see…

• On line archive
• Liverpool University, Olaf Stapleton collection
• Wikipedia article on Stapleton

Stanton Coit on holiday. Image courtesy of Bishopsgate Library

Stanton George Coit co-founded the Union of Ethical Societies, which was the forerunner of the present British Humanist Association.

Coit was born in Columbus, Ohio. He studied at Amherst College, Massachusetts, 1879, and became an aide of Felix Adler who had founded the Society for Ethical Culture in New York in 1876.

He continued his studies at Columbia University, New York, 1881-2, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he obtained his D.Ph in 1885.

Neighbourhood Guilds – an instrument of social reform

Returning via London in 1885 he was evidently impressed by Toynbee Hall, which began in Commercial Street, Whitechapel, in 1883/4, with the aim of getting university graduates to undertake social work in deprived areas. On returning to New York he founded the ‘Neighborhood Guild’, now known as the University Settlement House, in New York City’s Lower East Side. He later (1891) wroteNeighbourhood Guilds: An Instrument of Social Reform.

London must have had a great impression on him since he soon returned, to open a Neighbourhood Guild in Kentish Town, and he remained for the rest of his life (marrying in 1898 and taking British citizenship in 1903).

London’s Ethical Societies

In 1888, he was recommended by Moncure Conway, who was returning to America, to succeed him as minister of the South Place Religious Society, and it was at this time that its name was changed to South Place Ethical Society, reflecting its change of philosophical viewpoint. He served in this role until 1891 when Conway returned.

Coit met F. J. Gould at a lecture in March 1889 on the Moral Instruction (La Morale Laïque) in French Primary Schools. He assisted Gould in setting up an East London Ethical Society in 1890 at a dancing saloon by Mile End Road, which in 1894 moved to a corrugated iron hall in Libra Road, Old Ford.

In 1894 Coit founded his own West London Ethical Society, set up a Moral Instruction League and began a journal The Ethical World.

In 1896 Coit and Gould helped to found a Union of Ethical Societies which, bringing together existing ethical societies in Britain, was the forerunner of the present British Humanist Association.

Ethical Church

After his naturalisation he joined the Independent Labour Party and stood as a candidate for Wakefield in elections in 1906 and 1910.

In 1909 the West London group purchased an old Methodist chapel in Bayswater, renaming it the Ethical Church. They embellished it with stained glass windows depicting Elizabeth Fry, Bernard Shaw and Saint Joan, and in 1923 a white column dedicated to their Platonic Ideals. Gould describes him in his 1923 autobiography:

Coit was a fair-haired American from Ohio, and he preached an admirable Humanist gospel in a happy alternation of smiles and hurricanes. At Bayswater, West London, he still flies the Ethical Church flag, and continues to exercise a breezy and hygienic influence on religious and social thought.

Coit was editor of the International Journal of Ethics 1893-1905, and wrote a number of books and pamphlets, including an Ethical Hymn Book (1905). He retired as leader of the Ethical Movement in 1935 to be succeeded by Harold Blackham, and spent his last years at Birling Gap, near Eastbourne.

See also…

• Wikipedia article on Coit

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx was a German political philosopher who wrote about economics and politics. His ideas played a significant role in the development of modern communism.

Marx argued that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions which would lead to its destruction. Just as capitalism replaced feudalism, he believed socialism would, in its turn, replace capitalism, and lead to a stateless, classless society called pure communism.

Marx and religion

Karl Marx thought that religion was an illusion, with no real God or supernatural reality standing in the background. Religion was a force that stopped human societies from changing.

Marx believed that religion was a social institution, and reflected and sustained the particular society in which it flourished.

He went further. Religion was a tool used by the capitalists to keep the working-class under control.

Religion provided the working-class with comfort in their miserable oppressed circumstances, and by focussing attention on the joys to come after death, it distracted the workers from trying to make this life better.

Furthermore, it took the noblest human ideals and gave them to a non-existent God, thus cheating human beings of realising their own greatness and potential.

Marx argued that the illusory happiness provided by religion should be eliminated by putting right the economic conditions that caused people to need this illusion to make their lives bearable.

Religion was like a pain-killer (hence Marx’s famous reference to it as “the opium of the people”), but what was needed was to cure the sickness, not sedate the patient.

Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the feelings of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of unspiritual conditions. It is the opium of the people.

Marx lived for a long time in London. He died there in 1883. After he died, his friend Engels finished many of his works. Marx is buried at Highgate Cemetery, London.

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Margaret Kennedy Knight was a psychologist, broadcaster and humanist.

Born in Hertfordshire, England, Knight went to Girton College, Cambridge University. In her third year there she found the “moral courage”, as she put it, to finally abandon the religious beliefs she had long been uneasy with.

Psychologist

Between 1926 and 1936 Knight worked as a librarian, information officer and editor for journal published by the National Institute of Industrial Psychology. She married her husband Arthur Rex Knight in 1936, then in 1938 she started working alongside him as an assistant lecturer in psychology at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland. Ten years later in 1948 she was promoted to lecturer in psychology, a post she held till her retirement in 1970.

Morals without Religion

In January 1955 Knight stunned post-war Britain by suggesting in two talks on the BBC’s Home Service (now Radio 4), that moral education should be uncoupled from religious education.

These two talks were published in Morals without Religion and other essays in 1955 by Dennis Dobson, which also contains an entertaining chapter on contemporary reaction to the talks, some of it hostile, much of it appreciative. Margaret Knight quotes from several letters, including one from Germany that she found particularly moving:

…Please accept the gratitude from an unknown man who has seen in your talk the sunrising of a new epoch based on the simple reflection; to do the good because it is good and not because you have to expect to be recompensed after your death. Being myself a victim of Nazi oppression I think that we all have to teach our children the supreme ethics based on facts and not on legends in the deepest interest for the future generations…

See also…

• Morals without Religion – transcript and response
• Wikipedia article on Knight