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un L i7
What is the Religion of Humanity ?
A DISCOURSE
p
AT
SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL,
MAY i 6th, 1880,
BY
MONCURE D. CONWAY, M.A.
LONDON :
SOUTH PLACE, FINSBURY.
PRICE TWOPENCE,
i
Mcfi
2.9 2.
�LONDON :
Waterlow & Sons Limited,
LONDON
WALL.
�WHAT IS THE RELIGION OF HUMANITY?
^JpHE phrase Religion of Humanity has been
much and vaguely used; and best phrases so
used are liable to degenerate into cant. There is some
thing pleasant to everybody in the word “Humanity”;
no doubt all sects would claim that theirs is the
religion of humanity. Even sects with creeds based
upon a curse on human nature would declare their
religion adapted to, and revealed to save, humanity,
therefore the religion of humanity.
Among more liberal people we sometimes hear the
word ‘ humanitarian ’ used for a believer in the
religion of humanity. ‘ Humanitarian ’ was coined
to represent the doctrine that the nature of Jesus
was human as distinguished from divine or angelic :
it is a good sign when such theological disputes are
so far past that their phrases are put to more
substantial work.
And this other phrase, the
Religion of Humanity, which I believe came from
the mint of Positivism, also shows a tendency to do
various duty. To the majority it probably means a
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religion which believes in the perfectibility of
mankind; it would include the idea of human
progress, also the sentiment of charity, of sympathy
with mankind, and a spirit of benevolent reform.
No doubt underneath the humanitarian hypothesis
of the nature of Jesus there was at work a faith in
human nature; and under any conception of a
religion of humanity there would be found the spirit
of love to man, the feeling of fraternity, and belief in
a happy destiny for all mankind.
These high feelings will, however, be reinforced in
proportion as it can be made clear to our minds
whether there is any sense in which that group of
sentiments in us which relate to humanity can be
defined as a religion; if so, in what sense it is a
religion distinct from other so-called religions; and
whether it is one which is fully credible to us,—
whether, that is, it represents the facts and phenomena
regarded by the religious sentiment.
That which we call ‘ Humanity ’ is the totality of
all that is moral in nature ; all that distinguishes and
chooses, which discriminates right from wrong, good
from evil, where all nature not human is unmoral—
gives equal support to good and bad,
All history is the history of the war of mankind
against external nature ; when we go beyond history
to tradition, and behind tradition to mythology, we
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we find this and only this—man combating Arctic
frost and torrid heat, tempest and flood, the barren
ness, the ferocities of the earth, the pitiless cruelties
of the pestilential and the rainless atmosphere. That
siege of man against nature has never been relaxed ;
it goes on still; and in that time man has learned
that his own nature represents all that is moral in the
universe he can comprehend.
I say represents : for certain animals seem
capable of love and mutual service; but they possess
this in the ratio of their approach to human nature,
and of their association with it. Therefore they
are man’s humble constituency; their feebler
minds and affections are represented by him as
against the inorganic universe, their common
enemy.
Now, this ancient interminable war
between man and inanimate nature has not been
one of sentiment, but of necessity. To wage it
has always been the condition of human existence
on the planet; all the animals that could not
wage it to some extent have become fossil; and
man would have followed them into extinction if
he had not steadily resisted his hostile environment.
But during all this war man’s sentiments were on
the side of his great adversary. He sang hymns
to the sun which consumed him, to the storm
which beat upon him; evoked a vast array of
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deities out of the elements, and prostrating himself
before them in one moment, in the next arose to
fight and conquer their cruelty.
Primitive man ascribed to the gods as their
particular realm all the elements and regions of
nature which he himself could not control.
His
own empire was built up in practical hostility to
this elemental empire of the gods.
It was the
necessity of the humanised world that it should
ever be encroaching on the gods’ world, turning
the chaos they had created to order and use.
Thus there was no love lost between the two.
Man’s attitude towards the gods was fear; and
that of the gods towards man was deemed to be
jealousy, sometimes fear also, lest he might build
a tower high enough to besiege heaven, or seize
on the apples of immortality. There resulted a
divorce between man’s practical life and his theology.
That set of beliefs, and diplomatic ceremonials to
the sky which were called religion, had nothing ,
to do with man’s humanity, which was necessarily
devoted to constant revision and correction of that
nature supposed to be the creation of the gods.
All of which may seem very childish notions.
Yet the so-called religions of the world have been
generally cast in the same mould; and that is the
shape they bear to this day.
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The wild powers of nature are translated by
theology and catalogued in the creeds. Where do
you find the doctrine of satisfaction or expiation?
Where do you find any basis for the doctrine that
no deity can forgive an offence except the penalty
be suffered and the law satisfied? You find it in
every creed, but you do not find it in the heart
and life of humanity.
People do not so exact
from others rigid legal satisfaction.
The parent
who worships a god demanding satisfaction, forgives
the child daily without any satisfaction. Humanity
could not have survived if it had practised the
theology of invariable expiation. But you will find
that dogma a reflection of the unswerving course
of natural objects, the unvarying sun and seasons,
the ever-recurring remorseless powers that now freeze,
now bring famine, and listen to no entreaties.
Where will you find the doctrine of vicarious
suffering?
Not in the voluntary life of humanity.
The judge or the parent may worship a deity
satisfied by the suffering of the just for the unjust,
but he would be shocked at any suggestion in the
court or the home that the innocent should, be
made to suffer for the guilty. And in the house
hold or in society, who would deliberately visit
the sin of a father upon his children ?
Where
then, do the creeds get these notions ? From the
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hard forces of nature, which punish transgressions
of natural law even though they be virtuous deeds,
secure the good of one by sacrifice of another;
now make the mother victim of the child, next
the child heir of the parent’s infirmities.
We might indeed go through the whole list of
dogmas that make up what is called religion, and
we should find them to be a rough translation of
nature’s roughness; not religion at all, because
confusing good and evil; unrelated to the moral
sentiment; a crude primitive science, or attempt
at a scientific theory of nature. Those which were
anciently deities personifying the inorganic aspects
of nature, are now abstract dogmas reflecting the
same thing; and as when they were deities or
demons, so now when they have become dogmas,
they represent precisely all that part of nature
which it is the business of humanity to resist,
restrain, or even exterminate.
We must, indeed, never forget that human .
beings are much better than their creeds; that
inside their stony dogmatic walls are cultured
spots of humane feeling; that they speak and act
gently while they worship wrath, and deal justly
while worshipping an unjust deity. There is a
blessed necessity which exterminates from the
practical life anti-social principles; and while it
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allows tongues to recite what creeds they please,
holds heart and hand to their need and duty
with an iron grip. Nevertheless mankind are not
passing unharmed through this opposition between
their dogmas and their humanity.
It is a very
serious thing that men should throw the sanctions
of sentiment and piety around deified reflections of
that inorganic world which it were man’s real
religion to master, and make into his own human
image and likeness.
These ancient ‘ religions ’
have adopted many humane sentiments, some of
them even patronise human life and its joys; but
they never make humanity the main thing, the
great religous force and director: all that immense
power of piety, devotion, enthusiasm, which to
gether make religion, are still on the side of the
inorganic universe and its traditional phantasms.
We may then answer our question, ‘ What is
the Religion of Humanity,’ by saying, it is a
religion which transfers to the moral and intellectual
forces which are mastering nature all the piety
that now worships personifications of the ob
structions mastered.
There is need that our
sentiment and our work should be on the same
side in this great struggle of humanity with
mountain and desert, volcano and flood. It is a
grievous anomaly to worship the mountain-god
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while we tunnel the mountain, and praise the
lightning-god while we raise a rod to divert his
bolt.
That kind of homage and praise are due
to skill and to science, and hard-handed labour;
not to the wild powers they are levelling and
curbing for us.
It may be said that such
adorations of natural forces do no harm; they
are directed to powers that cannot hear or heed
them.
But there is harm done when the finest
seed are sown on clouds, instead of in a soil
where they might bear fruit. We can little dream
what a reinforcement of the human work of the
world it would be if all the devotion and wealth
lavished on deities and dogmas were directed to
aid and animate man in his tremendous task of
humanising his world.
But, it may be asked, and it is the anxious
question of many hearts, is there no God of nature,
no God in nature? Is there no power above our
selves—or power not ourselves—that makes for
righteousness? And, if there be none, are we not
orphans? Are we not robbed of all heart and
hope in our struggle with earthly evil, having no
certainty of ultimate success ?
The Religion of Humanity answers, Yes, there is
a God in nature, a God and ruler of nature; but
that divine parent is nowhere discoverable except in
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the spirit of humanity. You may cry for help to
glowing suns and circling stars, to gravitation and
electricity, to ocean and sky, or to all of them
together; but no help or ray of pity will you get
until you have turned to lean on the heart and arm of
human love and strength. For these are the answers
of the universe to your cry. The proof of love in
nature outside you is a loving heart inside you.
Nature has laboured through untold ages to give you
that heart to rest upon, that hand to clasp yours.
We must credit nature with -what has come out of
it. Wild as are the forces around us, terrible as is
this vast machinery roaring around us,—amid which
we move like wondering children, or at some misstep
of ignorance are caught up and crushed, we may
still say that out of it all was evolved the thinker to
warn us, the man of skill to devise good for us, the
man of science to show us the safe path, the
physician to heal us, the artist to beguile us on the
way, the poet to cheer us; the friend, the lover, the
father, the mother, who try to guard us, or, if we are
wounded, seek to heal our wounds. All these were
evolved out of nature. They show us nature pointing
us to humanity,—to humanity, the crown and hope of
nature’s own self, the power which nature has created
for its own deliverance,—in distrusting which we
distrust the only God in nature, the God manifest
within us, and in the sweet humanities around us.
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Therefore must we love nature. As we go froth to
contend against its inorganic forces, we recognise
that our contest with nature is a friendly contest, for
deliverance of that inanimate world itself which
suffers the pains of labour until now, awaiting its
adoption into the liberty of the sons of God : it is
the steadfast transfiguration of nature in a light
higher than any dawn, a grandeur which its beauties
but faintly hint and symbolize.
In these days when, under the fierce light that
beats upon the throne of superstition, the ancient
images are falling from many household shrines,—
images which, however low their origin, have been
hallowed by the tender pieties and associations
twining around them,—there is a pathetic cry on
the air. The fine gold has waxed dim! the white
statues are crumbling ! ‘ Give us back our gods ! ’
cried the pagans of old when the Christians
shattered the fair idols of Europe; ‘Give us back
our Saints, our Blessed Mother,’ cried the Catholics
when Protestantism broke up the altars; ‘Give us
back our Faith, our divine Lord,’ cry Protestant
hearts in turn.
But know they not why these
perished and can never return? They could not
do the work of humanity; they could not hear,
they could not heed the cry of hearts that needed
something more than statues, pictures, or sentimental
beliefs.
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The other day we heard of the Holy Virgin
appearing in Ireland. The press even sent reporters
who gathered detailed information about the light
that was seen, and Mary, Joseph and John in the
midst. But in their descent these heavenly beings
did not bring bread to save one starving Irish
family. That was left to Saint America who came
over with a loaded ship, and is now doing for poor
human beings what the Virgin Mary does only for
her own altars and priests.
The heretic is not heartless because he cannot be
silenced by the piteous appeal of piety that its
idols and illusions shall be spared. He is listening
to a more sorrowful cry than that; it comes from
the great deeps of human agony, want, evil, despair;
it is a cry ever burthening the air, but never heeded
by the idols which have neither eye, ear, heart,
nor hand. How sweet those idols seem to those
who decorate them, cover them with devotion,
heap on them their gold, their love, and bathe
them with their tears; even so cruel they seem
to one who knows that it is for want of just
that devotion that millions of human beings find
this world a hell.
Poor Humanity, how is it tortured even by those
abstract dogmas, which inheriting the sway of demons,
have power to pervert the human heart; to make it
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act cruelly, unrelentingly, like the brutal elements
they embody in words and images !
I picture
Humanity as poor Juliet in her agony. There she is,
the beautiful soul, the perfect heart, the supremest
thing in nature ! Around her an environment of
persons who represent the wild elements. The vin
dictive feud of Montague and Capulet, cruel as
venom of serpents; parents who have taken pea
cock pomp into their breast instead of hearts; a silly
ignorant nurse.
They all represent the inorganic
elements surviving in human nature, pride, ignorance,
vengeance; these not hidden there as shameful things
but consecrated as duty and dignity: this is the lot
with which that heaven, to which Juilet has prayed all
her life, has surrounded her gentle soul in its sore
need 1
Is there no pity sitting in the clouds,
That sees into the Lottom of my grief ?
O, sweet my mother, cast me not away !
But the mother, slave of her lord, has gone. Then
once more to the clouds Juliet cries, ‘ O God ! ’ No
answer. The poor ignorant nurse alone is left her.
O nurse! how shall this be prevented ?
My husband is on earth, my faith in heaven ;
How shall that faith return again to earth,
Unless that husband send it me from heaven
By leaving earth ? —comfort me, counsel me.—
Alack, alack, that Heaven should practice stratagems
Upon so soft a subject as myself!
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Alas, Juliet finds that heaven is against her. She
thinks how different it would be if Romeo were only
able to leave earth and be god for a time. She meets
religion presently: the sympathetic, helpful friar, is a
disguise for the Religion of Humanity. For this friar
is a true holy father where the lordly father had
failed ; he does not point Juliet or Romeo to heaven
nor bid them pray, sing, or confess. When Romeo
has slain one in his desperation, the friar gets him off
to a safe place. He has drugs, and secret schemes,
by which he tries hard to outwit the inorganic tempers
that are crushing the lovers. He fails in the end ;
but that torch he holds over the dead faces of those
he sought to save, is the torch of the true Religion,
burning through a midnight of tragedies on to the
hour that shall raise its light to be a flaming dawn.
Do you ask what tidings more glad can the Religion
of Humanity bring to hearts in their agony, the agony
caused by the discord, pride, ungentleness of
spirit in men and women ? Why, it brings hope of a
time when hearts will not be proud and harsh,
because religion will have concentrated all its power
of renovation upon them. Religion will recall its
protecting forces from the nature-gods and gather
them all around human beings, to love them, help
them, save them; so that when Juliet cries ‘O God!
her father shall be at hand, her mother shall serve her
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as if Juliet were the one Holy Virgin, so that no
human being shall ever be brought up to fancy that
there is any higher religion than to promote human
happiness, purity, and wisdom.
The religion of humanity thus has its meaning
and promise for the individual heart, for the soul
with its own grief, in that it brings back piety from its
wanderings to seek out and love the divine in every
heart; but it also holds out to the world at large a
hope unknown to any theology, the promise of a
perfectly developed Humanity implying a perfect
world. For this religion shows mankind to be the
creator, and a loving creator ; whose eternal design is
not the salvation of certain elect ones, of those only
after they are dead, and from evils that do not exist,
but the salvation of all, of the living, from actual
evils. It reveals to each generation that it is not only
the heir of all the ages, but the incarnation of their
summed-up powers; that this trust bequeathed from
all preceding generations, represents not only man in
the past, but all that preceded man; every bird that
ever sang to its mate, every tiger that ever defended
its young; nay, every atom that ever clung to its
fellow-atom amid the star-mist, in the first throb of
that spirit of life which has climbed on to the
splendour of reason and glory of a heart, beside
which the sun and moon are mere sparks.
�This is the Holy Mother. This is the ever-blessed
unwearied Madonna bearing the man-child in her
arms. A legend runs that when Mary was travelling
in Egypt, and her arm failed from long bearing her
babe, a third hand grew out to sustain Jesus : even so
is it with the maternal spirit which is caring for the
world, watching over human hearts, bearing it onward.
Does the old support fail ? Io, another ! Already our
dear Mother is many-handed. Wherever are love,
thought, sympathy, and a devotion to truth and right,
there are her sustaining arms. Her unwearied watch
is with the student seeking truth and wisdom, with
the reformer, the philanthropist, the physician, the
man of science, the poet, the artist. Wherever there
is one who is contriving a new benefit for the earth,
some relief from evil, some mitigation of pain, some
beauty which shall soothe and delight earth’s wayworn pilgrims, some sweet song to beguile sorrow and
pain into self-forgetfulness, win hearts from vain
regrets, cast a sunbeam into the darkened breast of
guilt, proffer a draught of Lethe to the lips of Despair
and Death, there is our divine Father, and there our
heavenly Mother, majestic and beautiful: nature is
glorified in them : with them are the sign and seal by
which all nature, however wild, is for ever bound to
follow and obey their eternal attraction.
This Religion of Humanity therefore has not the
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disadvantages of some new sect or new idea: it
not only exists already, but it has existed for ages.
I believe it to be the only religion that does really
exist, and that alone which the great teachers have
taught.
It is a very common experience with those who
abandon an established church, sect, or creed, that
they never cease to honour the great teacher said
to have founded that church or creed. Most free
thinkers feel that they love Christ much more
genuinely than Christians. The same phenomenon
appears throughout the world. Wherever there is a
protestant movement we hear the cries, ‘Not
Buddhism but Buddha!’ ‘Not Confucianism but
Confucius!’ ‘Not Christianity but Christ!’
It
is not difficult to see why we love the teacher while
opposing the system named after him. The teacher
represented the religion of humanity. No matter
what he taught, he was another step; he sought to
remove some evil or error, and added something to
the growing life of the world.
But the system
which has borrowed his good name is invariably
one based on that which he resisted. Every socalled religion is a new edition of the old nature
worship : it is a system trying to sanction its power
with the prestige of a breaker of systems. But
such power can never be built up except by reversing
�the freedom and humanity of the system-breaker,
because it must rule by bribe and menace. There
never was a prophet who did not teach love,
forgiveness, gentleness; there never was a system
which did not make its prophet teach wrath,
expiation, satisfaction. ‘ Love your 'enemies,’ says
the prophet as he was; £ Depart into fire,’ says the
prophet as the system makes him.
As time goes on this anomaly is seen.
The
human religion is at work; people grow ashamed
of their dogmas; they more and more dwell on the
sweet parables, the kindly deeds, the human side of
their prophet; they try to hide and forget the awful
character which the system assigns him.
But it is
impossible : that awful character is an old role in the
drama of the gods; Jehovah had to play it, and
Jove, and Jesus; every successful name has to be
put to that part if a creed is to survive after it is
unloved and unbelieved. So, steadily, as know
ledge and liberty advance must such systems
crumble and their idols follow them; when their
supernatural terrors have become grotesque and
their celestial promises antiquated, there are left
only the vulgar fears and interests to which an
existing order appeals, and from that moment the
familiar face of selfishness is seen beneath the mask
of piety.
Such is the process now going on;
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by it true and faithul hearts are hourly set
free; and there is fair prospect of seeing a
swiftly-growing and expanding spiritual union among
the really religious, though the discovery that what
each sincerely loves in his prophet his seeming
opponent loves equally; and what he discards is
that which none can love, though it may be
tolerated. No man loves Jesus for his miracles:
no heart responds to his curse on a figtree; none
rejoices in his formula for cursing the goats at the
last day. The Jesus beloved is he who spoke of
the forgiven prodigal, who wept tears over his dead
friend, knew the scripture of the lilies and the
waving corn, promised peace, and gave men rest in
the faith that even as they forgave the trespasses of
men all the more would the divine love forgive
them.
That is the Jesus really beloved by the
sincere and lowly hearts that are not concerned in
Christianity as a politic system; and they do not
love him more than those called ‘infidels.’
There is one belief concerning Christ in which all
sects, churches, Secularists, Theists, Atheists agree:
they all agree that he was a man. Some believe he
was a God-man, others a miraculous man; all agree
that he was a man. That then is the only doctrine
that can be pronounced literally Catholic, that is
universal. And as the definition of a man grows
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truer, and as more and more mankind come to feel
how dependent they are for all advancement upon the
fidelity and wisdom of great and good men, it will
not be thought derogatory to Jesus that he should be
called a man. But it will be found derogatory to
connect him with the thundergods of primitive ages.
It will be resented more and more as a lowering of
his goodness and greatness to call him the incarnation
of Jehovah, whose biblical record is one of wrath,
injustice and cruelty. As Jove and Jehovah have
died of inhumanity, so will the Doomsday Christ pass
out of human love and belief. It will be realised
that the whole thought and work of Jesus was to
abolish that system of belief which Jehovah repre
sented, and all the gods like unto him. Those
personifications of crude, cruel nature, and Jesus
representing the love and morality which soften and
subdue nature, are practically opposite principles, and
their necessary combat makes all the serious contro
versies of our time.
When the orthodox talk of God becoming man, we
have only to say,—Let him be a real man and we can
believe on him. Remove from him the theologic
costume of miracle, of unforgiving last day wrath, of
ceremonial and ritual preserved from' the ancient
worship of the elements by cowed and terrified
barbarians; give us the great heart and brain, the real
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man as he was, ally him with the grand work of
humanity on earth, unite him with his true brothers,
his peers of every age and race, and be sure there
will be no heart on earth which shall fail to surround
him with love and homage !
Already there are signs that this is the way
Christianity is tending. The character of its defence
has completely changed. We no longer hear its
defenders resting it upon miracles or upon Judaic
history, but upon the morality and the humanities
they believe bound up with it. They plead for the
social and domestic virtues, and say that to the
masses these rest upon Christianity. That is a good
sign.
It is necessary to prove to them that
Christianity does not come into this moral tribunal
with clean hands; that it carries into innumerable
homes a book containing cruelties and obscenities,
as God’s word; that it propagates superstition, and
teaches man to rest for safety upon metaphysical
dogmas rather than righteousness : but, while main
taining this, we may gladly recognise the happy
change by which the dogmas are being steadily
overlaid by considerations of practical virtue. This
I believe will go on until out of these transitional
controversies shall emerge the full-formed religion
of Humanity, to be loved and honoured of all,
and to include all races in a fraternal competition
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to promote the health, happiness, and virtue
of the family of man.
Christian apostles felt
and foresaw this.
‘ Be not deceived,’ cried one,
‘ he who doeth righteousness is righteous.’ Said
another, ‘ Pure religion and undefiled is to visit
the widow and the fatherless in their affliction, and
to keep oneself unspotted by the world.’ A third
added, ‘ Love is the fulfilling of the Law.’ Equally
was this the testimony of Zoroaster, of Buddha, of
Confucius. In this religion have the prophets and
sages lived and died ; and this will remain for ever
the religion of the faithful and true, the helpful and
the just, when all our controversies have died away.
When the dogmatic systems have taken their place
among other relics of antiquated philosophy, there
will still be growing and expanding in the earth the
religion of humanity,—the hatred of pain, which
superstition worshipped; hatred of all sacrifice of
human welfare; passionate horror of all evil, and that
which inflicts suffering; passionate love of all that
promotes welfare; concentration of all powers within
and without to the humanisation of man and his
world; and the immortal hope that Humanity will
survive for ever, conquer all evil, attain perfect know
ledge and joy. .This religion will flourish over the
graves of all idols and creeds,—and this is the
Religion of Humanity.
�SOUTH PLACE CHAPEL.
WORKS TO BE OBTAINED IN THE LIBRARY.
BY M. D. CONWAY, M.A.
The Sacred Anthology: a Book of Ethnical s. d.
Scriptures...........................................
.... 10 0
The Earthward Pilgrimage.................................
5 0
Do.
do.......................................... 2 6
Republican Superstitions .................................
2 6
Christianity .......................
.............
... 1 6
Human Sacrifices in England
.......................
1 0
Sterling and Maurice...........................................
0 2
Intellectual Suicide...........................................
0 2
The First Love again...........................................
0 2
Our Cause and its Accusers.................................
0 1
Alcestis in England......................
0 2
Unbelief : its nature, cause, and cure ............. 0 2
Entering Society
...........................................
0 2
The Religion of Children.................................
0 2
What is Religion ?
0 2
Atheism: a Spectre...........................................
0 2
The Criminal’s Ascension.................................
0 2
Idols and Ideals (including the Essay on Chris
tianity ), 350 pages
.................................
6 0
Members of the Congregation can obtain this Work in the
Library at 5s.
BY A. J. ELLIS, B.A., F.R.S., &c., &c.
Salvation
......................................................
Truth ................................................................
Speculation ......................................................
Duty
................................................................
The Dyer’s Hand
...........................................
0
0
0
0
0
2
2
2
2
2
New Work by Mr. Conway—“A Necklace of Stories,”
illustrated by W. J. Hennessy, is now ready. Price 6s.
Mr. ALEXANDER J. Ellis’s Discourses:—“ Salvation:”
“Truth:” “Speculation:” “Duty:” and “The Dyer’s
Hand. Bound in 1 Vol., price Is.
Mr. Conway’s “ Demonology and Devil-lore.” Second
edition, revised and enlarged, 2 vols, illustrated. 28 s.
Members of the Congregation may obtain this work in
the Library at 23 s. 4 d.
�
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
Victorian Blogging
Description
An account of the resource
A collection of digitised nineteenth-century pamphlets from Conway Hall Library & Archives. This includes the Conway Tracts, Moncure Conway's personal pamphlet library; the Morris Tracts, donated to the library by Miss Morris in 1904; the National Secular Society's pamphlet library and others. The Conway Tracts were bound with additional ephemera, such as lecture programmes and handwritten notes.<br /><br />Please note that these digitised pamphlets have been edited to maximise the accuracy of the OCR, ensuring they are text searchable. If you would like to view un-edited, full-colour versions of any of our pamphlets, please email librarian@conwayhall.org.uk.<br /><br /><span><img src="http://www.heritagefund.org.uk/sites/default/files/media/attachments/TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" width="238" height="91" alt="TNLHLF_Colour_Logo_English_RGB_0_0.jpg" /></span>
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway Hall Library & Archives
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
2018
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
Conway Hall Ethical Society
Text
A resource consisting primarily of words for reading. Examples include books, letters, dissertations, poems, newspapers, articles, archives of mailing lists. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre Text.
Original Format
The type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data
Pamphlet
Dublin Core
The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/.
Title
A name given to the resource
What is the religion of humanity?: a discourse at South Place Chapel, May 16th 1880
Creator
An entity primarily responsible for making the resource
Conway, Moncure Daniel [1832-1907.]
Description
An account of the resource
Place of publication: [London]
Collation: 23, [1] p. ; 15 cm.
Notes: Part of Morris Miscellaneous Tracts 2. Printed by Waterlow and Sons, London Wall. With a list of works to be obtained in the Library of South Place Chapel at end of pamphlet.
Publisher
An entity responsible for making the resource available
[South Place Chapel]
Date
A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource
[1880]
Identifier
An unambiguous reference to the resource within a given context
G3347
Subject
The topic of the resource
Religion
Ethics
Rights
Information about rights held in and over the resource
<img src="http://i.creativecommons.org/p/mark/1.0/88x31.png" alt="Public Domain Mark" /><br /><span>This work (What is the religion of humanity?: a discourse at South Place Chapel, May 16th 1880), identified by </span><span><a href="https://conwayhallcollections.omeka.net/items/show/www.conwayhall.org.uk">Humanist Library and Archives</a></span><span>, is free of known copyright restrictions.</span>
Format
The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource
application/pdf
Type
The nature or genre of the resource
Text
Language
A language of the resource
English
Free Thought
God-Attributes
Human Nature
Humanism
Moral Theology
Morality
Morris Tracts
Positivism
Religion and Ethics