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

Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet contemporary of Julius Caesar. Little is known of him apart from his name and his poem De Rerum Natura (On the Nature of Things) which nevertheless reveals much about his beliefs and his character.

The main purpose of the work was to free Gaius Memmius (to whom he dedicated the poem) and presumably all of mankind of superstition and the fear of death.

His poem expounds the atomic theory of Democritus and the moral philosophy of Epicurus.

He argues against fear of gods/supernatural powers by demonstrating through observations and logical argument that the operations of the world can be accounted for entirely in terms of natural phenomena.

He argues against the fear of death by stating that death is the dissipation of a being’s material mind. Lucretius uses the analogy of a vessel, stating that the physical body is the vessel that holds both the mind and spirit of a human being. Neither the mind nor spirit can survive independent of the body. So, as a simple ceasing-to-be, death can be neither good nor bad for this being.

According to Lucretius, fear of death is a projection of terrors experienced in life, of pain that only a living (intact) mind can feel. Lucretius also puts forward the ’symmetry argument’ against the fear of death. In it, he says that people who fear the prospect of eternal non-existence after death should think back to the eternity of non-existence before their birth, which they probably do not fear.

Also see…

• On the Nature of Things
• Sir David Blatherwick’s tribute to Lucretius 
• Wikipedia article on Lucretius
• Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article on Lucretius

Burlington House was originally a private mansion in the Palladian style, and was expanded in the mid 19th century after being purchased by the British government. It was at this time in the 1870s when these statues were added.

The main building is at the northern end of the courtyard and houses the Royal Academy, while five learned societies occupy the two wings on the east and west sides of the courtyard and the Piccadilly wing at the southern end.

These societies, collectively known as the Courtyard Societies are:

• the Geological Society of London
• Linnean Society of London
• Royal Astronomical Society
• Society of Antiquaries of London
• Royal Society of Chemistry

Burlington House is most familiar to the general public as the venue for the Royal Academy’s high profile temporary art exhibitions.

The rear of the building is now home to a commercial art gallery Haunch of Venison.

Visting

The statues are on the south side of Burlington Gardens. The closes underground station is Picadilly Circus.

Also see…

• Royal Academy article on Burlington House
• Wikipedia article on Burlington House

The museum holds collections related to the borough of Nuneaton and Bedworth.

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The British Museum

Gallery 22

Its gallery number 22 contains busts of a number of ancient Greek thinkers and writers who are part of the humanist tradition.

Socrates (469-399 BCE), whose freethinking scepticism brought him into conflict with authoritarian political forces of the day and led to his execution and whose ethics were based on reason and experience, not religion

Epicurus (341-270 BCE), who believed that human life had come about by natural processes, that happiness depended on moderation and the respect and friendship of others, and that there was no afterlife

Chrysippus the Stoic (280-207 BCE), who believed reason, sympathy and knowledge were the tools human beings should use when addressing ethical problems.

Gallery 15

Gallery number 15 contains a very famous bust of the Athenian democratic statesman Pericles, whose funeral oration as recorded by the historian Thucydides presents a model of the open society which has inspired humanist political philosophers from John Stuart Mill to Karl Popper.

Gallery 36

In gallery 36 is a Portrait plaque of Dr Joseph Priestley – a nonconformist minister and scientist who aroused controversy with his various publications on religious matters, and was condemned as an atheist.

Visiting

The Museum is free to all visitors and is open daily 10.00am–5.30pm.

Also see…

• British Museum

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

At the time, bequests of donations to free thought organizations were confiscated because of the widely held assumption that a morally sound person would not want to donate to freethought organizations.   It was preceeded by a host of diverse publishing ventures from other freethinkers such as his father Charles Watts, Charles Bradlaugh and G. W. Foote but while those organizations diverged or closed altogether, the RPA became the most significant publishing organization for rationalist and freethought organizations.

The RPA included such members as Frederick James Gould and the vociferously anti-religion, ex-monk Joseph McCabe.    The RPA also was in part a response to the more radical elements of free thought.  While it had less defined set of practices and goals as other ethical and rationalist organizations of the period, the RPA was important in that it tried to increase the profile and publications of information that would lead to lead to the belief in a rationalist worldview.

Also See…

• A brief history of the Rationalist Association

• New Humanist

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Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher.

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