Books Which Made Me a Rationalist

Between 1940 and 1941, the Literary Guide (now New Humanist) ran a series of articles and contributions under the heading ‘Books which made me a rationalist’, inviting readers to reflect on their roads to rationalism. While some declared that literature had very little to do with their journey, many other contributors described the enormous impact of works spanning evolutionary theory and biblical criticism, poetry and history, and the Rationalist Press Association‘s own publications. The resulting collection offers a glimpse into the stories of dozens of people—many born and raised within the strictures of the Victorian period—who shed religious belief and embraced a humanist approach to life.

Under the above heading we shall, during the forthcoming months, publish a series of articles from well-known Rationalist authors which we have received in response to our request for contributions to the proposed Symposium. The articles will be descriptive of the experiences of the writers in abandoning Orthodoxy and accepting the Rationalist outlook. This month we are publishing the first two articles, together with brief replies from one or two readers.

My pathway towards Rationalism was that of natural science, and so far as I can remember (it is now more than fifty years ago) no one book was responsible for my conversion, nor was there for me any sudden Patmos revelation of light and truth. The satisfactory end had to be fought for step by step. The books that most influenced my mind at that time were undoubtedly those that sought to explain and justify the theory of man’s slow evolution from lower forms of life— a theory which every “pale young curate” felt himself competent to deride and refute.

I read much controversial literature concerning Darwin’s The Origin of Species and his Descent of Man, and I constantly returned to these fundamental sources for information and guidance. I was, however, even more profoundly influenced by works of the great pioneer interpreters of the doctrine of Evolution such as T. H. Huxley, whose dialectical onslaughts upon the theories of Special Creation, supported by the Rev. Dr. Wace, were a special delight. Huxley had a clear-cut mind, a courageous temperament, and an incisive and stinging pen. His life-long determination was to “to make things clear and get rid of cant and shows of all sorts,” and he possessed in a high degree the style and the power most likely to appeal to a youthful controversialist such as I was then fast becoming.

I was also greatly influenced by writers such as Sir John Lubbock and Dr. Andrew Wilson, whose more popular treatment of the subject gained a quicker and more comprehending hold upon my mind. But I think that I was most captivated by the co-ordinating and mind-expanding works of Herbert Spencer, who related the Evolutionary doctrine to the great subjects of sociology, ethics and education. Some of his shorter essays, especially his “Progress: its Law and Cause,” I read many times, and always with satisfaction. I may have been drawn to Spencer by the knowledge that he too was practically self-taught and owed nothing to the universities. It was Spencer who invented the serviceable phrase “Survival of the Fittest,” and he consistently maintained that the existing order of nature is the result of a gradual process and not of “special creation.”

There were also books dealing with other branches of science which quite definitely helped to shape my mind, and I always regretted that sociological and kindred studies compelled me to desert the sciences of geology and astronomy, to which I was specially attracted. Sir Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology and Geikie’s Text-Book of Geology were very favourite volumes, and in such astronomical studies as I was able to undertake I was greatly helped by Sir Robert Ball’s Story of the Heavens and by the more popular expositions of R. A. Proctor.

My reading in matters that touched directly upon religion and Christianity was too varied and extensive to enable me to select any book as specially affecting my outlook. I read all that was written by W. K. Clifford, and among the books that I remember with gratitude are Mill’s Three Essays on Religion and the works of Estlin Carpenter and James Martineau. Renan’s Life of Jesus I read several times with great appreciation, and I also studied with some care the famous Leben Jesu by Strauss and Ecce Homo by Seeley. I ought also to include among the books that I read, with profit to myself, Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums, which had been translated into English by George Eliot.

The historical development of Christianity was a subject to which I gave special attention, and among the many books that I read with profit were Draper’s The History of the Conflict between Religion and Science and William Howitt’s History of Priestcraft in All Ages and Nations. I perhaps over-estimated the quality of Howitt’s book for the reason that, like myself, he was a Nottingham man. I must not omit from the list of books which influenced my mind Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, and I have never understood why this entirely moderate work should have aroused so much pious wrath. Lecky’s History of the Rise of the Spirit of Rationalism in England and Draper’s The Intellectual Development of Europe have also a revered place in my memories.

Lest the above acknowledgments should give the impression that I lived exclusively upon such high-brow material, I hasten to say, with every kind of emphasis, that I derived immense stimulus from nearly all the ephemeral literature of the Freethought Movement of the period. Some of it may not have been helpful, but much of it was both rich in thought and of first-class propagandist value. It was the custom fifty years ago to sneer at the National Reformer, the Freethinker, and the Agnostic Journal as being cheap and vulgar; but to me at least they were a welcome tonic, and I end this intellectual confession with a sincere acknowledgment of all that I owed to them.

This is not a very easy question for me to answer. First, I dislike definite labels; one is so apt to trim oneself into the shape of what one has declared oneself to be. Am I a Rationalist? I believe that I have hopes and convictions that might clash with that definition, taken in its strictest sense. But I am, I hope, a liberal-minded person, and I do feel sure that the Rationalist Movement has done more than any other philosophy or creed for the benefit of humanity.

This seems a tremendous claim, yet I cannot see how it can be disputed. Let any thoughtful, unbiased person reflect on it, and its truth will be clear enough. We come from mystery, and we go to mystery. All that happens to us between birth and death can be dealt with by the exercise of reason, and in no other way unless we are to be lost in the bogs and mists of superstition, passion, ignorance, and lust. No theology has yet been successful in dealing with the problems of humanity, and all, however right in their beginnings, have sunk to degradation— at best a soporific for the weak-minded, at worst a terrible weapon in the hand of the tyrant. What may be before us none of us can know, and, though what is termed spirituality is implicit in mankind, the wisest keep this to themselves and rule their lives by the highest authority we know—the human intellect that implies the human ethical values.

What books brought me to this opinion? I scarcely know which was the first. I received the usual careless, muddled education in these matters. I learned obliquely about God and Sunday and sin, and I was both terrified and rebellious. Before I was able to reason I instinctively resented (I believe that most children did) the servile attitude I was supposed to adopt towards this remote Deity. I did not feel myself a sinner, a worm, born in sin, or that I had “gone astray.” When a hint of this heresy crept out I was warned that I was suffering from the sin of Lucifer—intellectual pride. The result of this rebuke was that Lucifer became my secret hero.

As I grew old I watched these Christians, as they termed themselves, who surrounded me, and I was impressed by their indifference to their own awful creed. How could they behave as they did if they believed in Hell? How, if they really followed Christ, a God of Love, could they be unkind, even cruel? I soon ceased to believe that they believed, but hid my incredulity, for taboos and superstitions were all about me, and one inquiring mind was “naughty.”

My reading was uncontrolled, and I had the use of good public libraries. In this matter I read the ancient authors—mostly, I think, Bohn’s admirable edition. Here was much that suited me, and I fell in love with virtue, in the Latin sense, from the perusal of Plutarch’s Lives. The poor blood-stained Christian myth was soon cleared from my mind, and I was greatly stimulated to find that the people whom I had been taught to despise as Pagans were heroes and philosophers of a courage and a wisdom such as I had been groping after. Here was my exemplar, and I have never forsaken it. In the serene and tranquil mind of Lucretius I found inspiration and solace. I must have been about twelve years of age when I read de Rerum Natura, in, I suppose, the Lachman translation. I recall a dark covered volume with closely packed pages of print that had continually to be taken back to the library to be “renewed.” I never owned it, but I carried about a book into which I had copied many passages. Here was a matter that I could credit, a philosophy that I could admire, and an example that I could try to emulate. This casting aside of all superstition, of all fairy tale, legend, and myth, was to me unspeakably refreshing.

Yet I read largely of fiction, and was a keen expert in all types of romance; but I liked to think that all this amusing, exciting miscellanea was fiction, and that in Titus Carus’s Lucretius lay the truth. The poetic passages seemed to me superb, and to breathe the sublime air of the antique world that I so much admired.

Stoic philosophy attracted me immensely, and I fell under the spell of Marcus Aurelius, who seemed to me a figure of complete nobility. The Meditations I read, I think, in Jeremy Collier’s translation; but here, again, I never owned the book, and it is a long time ago. The loneliness of this heroic soul had an immense charm for me, and I sympathized with his persecution of the fanatic Christians whose crazy zeal was disturbing the structure of that—to me—fair antique world.

I read much history, and was appalled and disgusted by the centuries of bloodshed for which men who professed to be Christians, even to bigotry, were responsible, and I found few whom I could wholeheartedly admire until the liberal movement at the end of the eighteenth century, with the notable exception of Baruch Spinoza, whose works and life were to me most inspiring. In this Cartesian philosophy, where Monism was substituted for Dualism, there was not much of what is now termed Rationalism; but this doctrine of the one God or Spirit pervading everything was grateful to me, as I hoped and believed that Pantheism had always the ring of common sense, and that the tenet “our real existence is knowledge” was undisguisedly rationalistic. The poems of Matthew Arnold, among the works of many other modern writers, strengthened me in my convictions; and it would be ungracious not to mention with deep appreciation the excellent handbooks published by the Rationalist Press Association.

The book which first set me on the road to Rationalism was the Bible. Despite all assurances that it represented the inspired and revealed Word of God, and that consequently to question either its authority or any of its assertions would be a gross act of impiety, there were certain passages in it with which, at a very early age, my mind could not feel completely satisfied. Perhaps the earliest indication of this nascent scepticism appeared when I fell to wondering why God, according to Holy Writ, so frequently talked with men in the olden days but never did so in our time. As I grew to learn a little more about the world we live in, it seemed to me that many of the Biblical statements could not be reconciled with fact, and it followed that the Bible was not that repository of divine truth which I had been taught to credit it with being. I can remember, before entering my ‘teens, thinking that, while it purported to explain the origin of all things in the story of creation, it did not account for the creator. “Where,” I wanted to know, “did God come from?” I still await an answer.

When the R. P. A. Reprints appeared I realized they were just what I wanted. The first one I read was Laing’s Modern Science and Modern Thought, a fine introduction to a great series that made impossible any return on my part to the orthodox fold.

My passage from Orthodoxy to Rationalism was effected by Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma. When I was twenty a friend persuaded me to read the lectures of Dr. Momerie. I thought nothing of him, but was intrigued by his quotations from Arnold’s book, which I immediately procured. I read it, many times re-read it, and frequently quoted it, “tiring my hearers in my Master’s praise” (if Shakespeareans will allow that adaptation). After an interval of many years I tried to read it again, and could not get interested. Does anything of it remain with me? Yes, this: that “terms which with St. Paul are literary terms theologians have employed as if they were scientific terms.” At twenty I found this very enlightening, and only the other day, I discovered myself writing in a controversial letter: “the language of religion is poetical, not precise.” The time came when my Rationalism took on, from the writings of Huxley, Tyndall, and others, a more Materialistic hue. This lasted for many years, but has since faded. I still consider that it was Matthew Arnold, though I am now more critical of him, who set my feet on the path of inquiry.

The title of this Symposium at once raises two awkward questions in my mind. Am I a Rationalist at all, in the sense in which the word is here used ? And, if so, was it books that made me one? I do not believe, as most professing Rationalists appear to do, that we exist only as parts of a mindless mechanism. Moreover, I do believe in the doctrine of Jesus, that we are “members one of another.” On the other hand, I have no use either for the Christian mythology or for the so-called historical basis of Christian dogma, which the Church still insists upon; and if to reject these is to be a Rationalist, then a Rationalist I am. As to what books made me so, I should say that Hymns Ancient and Modern was the chief agent of my liberation.

It was not books that did it, although of course subsequently I read many with interest and agreement—such, for instance, as Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology. It was people; it was gradual; it was steady. It would thus require pages of autobiography to describe my secession from Orthodoxy, and I am not prepared to embark upon that.

I cannot think of any book that made me a Rationalist. I never passed through a religious phase, and so never had to be brought back to my senses.

I find the question peculiarly difficult to answer, because I was not brought up as a member of any religious body. So there was no question of a sudden, or even a gradual, realization that I must apply rational tests to religious dogmas in which I had formerly believed on other grounds. If any such event has happened in my life it has been in connection with my political and social theories.

Nevertheless I needed Rationalist propaganda, because I went to schools where hymns, prayers, divinity lessons, and so on, were the order of the day. So I absorbed a good deal of unreason more or less unconsciously. And about the age of puberty I was nearly converted. Indeed, I might have been so had I not realized that the clergy at schools use the emotional upset which is inevitable at this period to overcome the rational objections of their charges.

At this time I was fortified against accepting the claims of Christianity by the study of two books which, though rather out of date, are very well worth reading. These are the Bible and Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe. The former convinced me of three things. I saw that Christianity had developed from the cult of a bloodthirsty being much more like the Devil than the loving Deity whom I was asked to worship. I saw that the documents on which Christianity was based were inconsistent. Some statements in the New Testament must be untrue, so all of them might be. And I saw the immense gaps, both in theory and practice, which separated the Churches of to-day from those of the first century. At the same time I learned enough history to see that, as a witness for Christianity, the Church was much weaker than the Bible. If I could not base my religion on the documents ascribed to St. Luke or St. Paul, I certainly could not do so on Churches which had been ruled by Henry VIII or Alexander VI.

I fully agree with the bishops that the rising generation do not study the Bible sufficiently. So long as Christianity is the official religion of this country every thinking person should study the documents on which it is alleged to be based.

The Riddle of the Universe is a plain account of the world as it appeared in the light of the scientific knowledge of fifty years ago. I saw that, when the kind of thought whose validity I could test in the school laboratory was applied outside it, theology went the way of astrology. Haeckel for the first time presented me with a sketch of the scientific view of the universe. He did not convert me to his view. I could not accept his rather crude Materialism. Nor did he adequately explain the origin of religion. Only later did I realize that in primitive societies what we now call science, art, and religion were fused into a single activity which was, on the whole, socially valuable, and that the religions of to-day, whose gods are supernatural instead of being personified natural and social forces, are actually less rational than those of primitive men.

I bought a sixpenny reprint of The Riddle of the Universe from Messrs. Watts and Co., took it to school, and lent it to my friends. It was discovered, and my father was asked to take me away, as being a disturbing element. This he refused to do. But the schoolmaster was quite right. A book of that kind was incompatible with the compulsory chapel and scripture lessons of Eton. It made the masters look fools, and was therefore highly subversive.

I should like to see The Riddle of the Universe very widely distributed, but only as an introduction to the scientific outlook on the world. Wells, Huxley, and Wells’s The Science of Life would be a good supplement to bring its scientific views up to date, while Engels’s Anti-Dühring and Feuerbach would provide what seems to me a far more credible philosophy.

Of course many other books reinforced the lessons o f these two. Perhaps the school text-books of physics and chemistry were as influential as any. They showed me that a large group of happenings could be rationally predicted and controlled, and gave me the hope that the same kind of thinking was universally applicable. But I think it is to the Bible and the Riddle that I owe most.

One day in the autumn of 1902 I overheard one of my schoolfellows reading aloud with great amusement to a fireside group some passages from the notes to Shelley’s Queen Mab. Shelley till then had been only a name to me, but from that moment he became one of my teachers. I found his works in the library and read Queen Mab, notes and all. I was taken by storm. Here I found all my half-felt, half-suppressed doubts of Bible religion taken up and transformed into fierce denials. Even in childhood I had been shocked by such stories as Joshua’s butcheries, Samuel’s hewing Agag in pieces, and David’s torture of the Ammonites. In my orthodox days I tried hard to believe that what would certainly be wrong now had been somehow right then; but the effort grew less and less easy. Shelley, by sweeping aside all apologetic compromises, set my mind free.

About the same time I read Draper’s History of the Conflict between Religion and Science. Till then I do not think it occurred to me that there was such a conflict. Draper revealed to me for the first time the continuous hostility to scientific discovery of official Christianity from the days of the Fathers to the nineteenth century, and the martyrdoms of Hypatia, Servetus, Bruno, and Vanini at the hands of Christian orthodoxy.

Other authors, such as Renan and T. H. Huxley, played their part later; but it was Shelley and Draper who made me a Rationalist.

The case against “Infidelity” had been familiar to me from very early years. I read in my father’s library sufficient “Apologetics” to interest me. But I found in Watson and Butler a very poor basis for any genuine “rationalism” to be found for the “Infidel” case as represented by the apologists of the obviously True Faith.

I was fifteen when I read Paine’s Age of Reason. It began my “conversion,” but its chief effect was that I realized I had been fooled. I had taken for granted that Paine’s opponents could be trusted to tell their readers what Paine’s principles really were.

I heard Charles Bradlaugh— first in Radical political lectures. Then I went once or twice to hear him at the Hall of Science, London, where the bookstall revealed to me a whole world of literature essentially different from books I had hitherto read. Lea, Lecky, and Gibbon influenced me deeply, partly because I always loved history. These authors more than any others helped me to see through the foolish, if then fashionable, fallacy that “the Hand of God in History” was a reliable Theistic theory. When I read Ludwig Büchner’s Force and Matter, side by side with Darwin’s Origin of Species, I felt supernaturalism slipping beneath my feet and found a new and better certainty of a world where Man replaces God— because

(Headmaster of The School, Dartington Hall, Totnes, S. Devon)

Since I was invited to write this contribution I have tried hard to remember which books made me a Rationalist, and I have found myself unable to answer with any certainty. I remember many books that interested me, and that I felt I ought to read surreptitiously; but I cannot now be sure whether I became a Rationalist because I read them, or whether I read them because I had become a Rationalist.

I grew up with fervent Nonconformist beliefs. I attended Sunday school with pious eagerness, and I remember winning prizes for Bible knowledge. I sang in the choir of a Congregational church, and I religiously said my prayers at night. I was a schoolboy when the Titanic sank, and I remember the religious awe with which I read of the passengers singing “Nearer my God to thee” as the ship sank. At that time I had devout beliefs and pious emotions. And then, quite suddenly I seem to remember, when I was fifteen or sixteen, I became an Agnostic. I had none of the intense struggles that one reads about as occurring in adolescence. I took off religion as one might take off an old coat and simply threw it away. I had no pangs, and I have never felt any since.

About this time I began to read T. H. Huxley, and I am sure that his writings affected me profoundly. Huxley said that he would disdain “to plaster the fair face of truth with that pestilent cosmetic rhetoric”; but I am sure that his rhetoric, as well as his arguments, influenced me as it must have influenced countless others. His magnificent retort to Bishop Wilberforce at the Oxford meeting of the British Association in 1860, and the moving eloquence of his lecture on “The Meaning of a Liberal Education,” are examples of a style that may have done something to compensate for the religious phraseology one had relinquished. I read too Ernst Haeckel, and, while I was not in fact capable of judging the soundness of his arguments, it certainly seemed at the time that he was knocking the stuffing out of his and my religious opponents. I quoted him with great gusto. Robert Blatchford also became, very temporarily, one of my heroes; but after a bit I began to think him crude, and I did not like what he wrote during the last war.

I remember four considerations that influenced me especially. The first was the incompatibility of the Bible with the doctrines of science, and more especially of the book of Genesis with geology and the theory of evolution. The second was the history of the Church, which, so far as I could see, had nearly always been in the wrong. I gloated over the long series of rearguard actions it seemed to have fought with science, emerging, so my Rationalist books and pamphlets informed me, defeated every time. I was particularly scandalized by the attitude of the Church to the use of anaesthetics in childbirth. I expect that I am not the only Rationalist whose hostility to organized religion has been confirmed or increased by that particular bit of history. Thirdly, there was the problem of evil, with which St. Augustine had struggled, and of which no solution seemed possible in terms of a God who was both omnipotent and good. This difficulty was always met by the argument that God has given us free will, that pain and evil had resulted from our misuse of this free will, and that God could not therefore be blamed. This reply seemed to me then, and has seemed to me ever since, to be mere muddled silliness. Fourthly, as regards the Christian religion, I was put off by the doctrine of the Virgin Birth. The biological books on evolution that I was reading all assured me that there was some advantage in bisexual reproduction. This method, it appeared, came higher in the scale of evolution. I was at a loss, therefore, to understand why it was thought any advantage to Christ to be born without benefit of spermatozoon. It is true that sex was not quite nice, but I could not see why an omnipotent and good God should be ashamed of the method of reproduction he had presumably devised.

And then there appeared on my horizon three writers who have had an immense influence on the whole of my generation— Shaw, Wells, and Russell. I discovered them in that order. Shaw was gorgeous. It was exhilarating to see the middle-class idols being knocked of their pedestals, and I had a wonderful time cheering and clapping while he did it. But I began to suspect that he was only half a Rationalist, and after the Preface to Back to Methuselah I doubted whether he was as much as half. So, while he has given me much delight, I cannot pretend that my Rationalism owes as much to him as to the other two.

For some years I read Wells with the utmost eagerness. I liked his immense zest and his astonishing gift for the unforgettable phrase. He filled me with a passionate eagerness to make the world more sensible, and not merely to think more sensibly myself. I came to share his intense irritation with muddle and waste, and the sheer irrationality that stands between mankind and that world of plenty and order that is already within our grasp if we had but the sense to reach out to it. His has been the most eloquent and influential voice of the last generation pleading for rationality in action as well as in thought. There is no one to whom we owe a greater debt. But to me Russell has meant most. His Principles of Social Reconstruction, written and published during the last war, is an unsurpassed example of a powerful intellect, inspired by a rational and humane outlook, remaining sane at a time when sanity must have been well nigh impossible. It was the first of his books I read, and for many years it was my Bible. I came upon it at a critical time in my own development, when, having already lost religion, I was about to escape from patriotism. I am quite sure that it has influenced my subsequent outlook more than any other book I have ever read. The penetration of his intellect, the passionate humanity of his outlook, his beautiful wit, and the graceful felicity of his style have been a perpetual delight to me. I do not know what people mean when they say that he is arid, for to me no one has made Rationalism seem more attractive.

I fear that in my survey I have omitted Havelock Ellis, Voltaire, J. S. Mill, and many others, but it seemed best to concentrate on the focal points in one’s own personal development.

Although brought up in a dogmatically Christian and almost devout atmosphere, yet I was naturally of an inquiring and even doubting disposition, and frequently asked in my early years, with regard to the alleged miracles of the Bible, why such events did not happen in our time. To this the unsatisfactory answer was usually forthcoming that they were not now necessary. I had not then read Hume’s celebrated essay.

A Scotch teacher encouraged up to a certain point— he was a Deist— a natural tendency that was further stimulated by Mill’s Logic, which he gave me to read. But decisive for my revolt from all important traditional beliefs and irrational authority was the reading in my twentieth year of Berkeley’s inappropriately named Principles of Human Knowledge, which offers as the answer to all ultimate questions simply this: God has willed it so. His famous argument, which was to make an end of Atheism and Freethinking impressed me as being full of fallacies. An examination of it led me to understand the unproved character of a fundamental thesis of Idealism— esse = percipi vel cogitari [‘to be is to be perceived‘].

What made me a Rationalist? Books certainly, but not books alone. As the son of Evangelical parents (my father was a clergyman of the Church of England) I spent my early life in an atmosphere of piety, though it was not for me a harsh piety, since its taboo on theatres, dances, and cards did not then worry me at all. In my later boyhood my faith assumed fanatical forms, and I felt I was a saved sinner, commissioned to pluck other souls from the burning. It was chiefly my surreptitious dippings into Colenso’s work on the Pentateuch that undermined my belief in the verbal inspiration of the Bible; and, though I did not completely shed my Evangelicalism until I was nearly twenty-one, I had long ceased to regard the entertaining stories of Yahveh in Genesis and Exodus as any less mythical than Homer’s accounts of the escapades of Zeus and Apollo. The Bible appealed to me as a great literature and not only as a monument of piety, and I can claim that its intelligent study was one of the factors of my Rationalism.

Farrar’s Mercy and Judgment destroyed for me the dogma of eternal torments for the “wicked”; and, a little later, my belief in the blood-expiation of Jesus to avert the wrath of God from his elect yielded to the theory defended in the late Canon Wilson’s Hulsean Lectures on the Atonement, which equated the Atonement with the Incarnation, and at the same time inconsistently equated the Atonement with a spiritual process taking place in the believer. The dogma of the deity of Jesus was the next to go. I consulted rather cursorily several Unitarian manuals, and read through Theodore Parker’s Discourse of Matters Pertaining to Religion. Matthew Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, God and the Bible, and St. Paul and Protestantism shattered my temple of miracles, though his Jesus, compacted of “sweetness and light,” still remained for me a figure of veneration and so justified my retention of the name of Christian. A careful comparison of texts convinced me that the statement “Jesus is the Christ” covered a long Christological evolution, of which some six phases are traceable in the New Testament itself. Later reading has helped me to follow the further phases of this development in the history of primitive Christianity, and in this connection I would specially recommend for study Turmel’s Histoire des Dogmes (Part I) and Harnack’s History of Dogma.

Most noteworthy among the books that influenced me in my undergraduate days was Thomas Scott’s English Life of Jesus, which is the most complete compendium I know of the disharmonies and incredibilities of the Gospels. I read also the work of a painstaking but forgotten author, James Thomas’s Our Records of the Nativity, which is a very able and exhaustive critique of Sir William Ramsay’s Was Christ Born in Bethlehem? In my humble opinion, Mr. Thomas makes hay of Ramsay’s ingenious plea for the accuracy of “Luke.” Ramsay’s apologetic I confess I did not read until many years after I came to London.

Albert Réville’s History of the Deity of Jesus Christ and F. W. Newman’s Phases of Faith confirmed me in my Modernism. In Francis Newman I discovered a kindred soul, who, like me, had passed reluctantly from Evangelical piety to an emotional Deism.

The possibility that Jesus was wholly mythical I examined carefully. I read J. M. Robertson’s Christianity and Mythology and A Short History of Christianity; but, though these books have convinced me how considerable is the mythical element in the New Testament, I still lean to the Historicist rather than to the Mythicist side. Naturally I have not confined myself to Robertson’s presentation of the thesis, “Jesus never lived” and am well acquainted with what Couchoud, Dujardin Kalthof, Rylands, Bergh Van Eysinga, and Arthur Drews have to say about it. The miraculous and the non-miraculous in the Gospels are so blended that the construction of a non-miraculous life of Jesus becomes a very arbitrary performance. Critical readers of Schweitzer’s Quest of the Historical Jesus will feel this strongly. Perhaps we have rejected the miracle stories too hastily. My studies in psychical research have persuaded me that many miracle stories have a factual basis, though, of course, miracles do not happen in the theological sense of miracles.

Until my twenty-second year I clung to the belief in God, though my Theism had become rather attenuated. But the “Great Companion” was doomed to fade out of the sanctuary of my soul with the other figments of my theological dream. Charles Bradlaugh’s pamphlets, A Plea for Atheism and Is there a God?, mercilessly riddled my dualist conception of the universe. Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God and other books on comparative religion showed me how plausibly the growth of religion could be explained in terms of human psychology without involving the idea of supernatural guidance. Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe and T. H. Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature furnished me with a non-theistic philosophy of life. I went to Cambridge full of zeal for Christ and his alleged evangel; I left it a Monist and an Atheist.

My reading on religious topics since those days—thirty-seven years ago—has run into many hundreds of books, and though I am always ready, I hope, to weigh the arguments advanced by apologists for Christianity and Theism, I am compelled to remain a Rationalist. The heavens are dumb. Earth alone speaks to man. Since I continue to reject the idea of God as a person I may justly be described as an Atheist, though I confess to mystical leanings and find more satisfaction in the belief that the cosmos is a psychical unity than in Bertrand Russell’s theory that it is a jumble of “neutral particulars” (whatever they may be), worked up variously into the contrasted categories of matter and mind. As for immortality, I admit the force of the evidence, based on anthropological, physiological, and psychological data, against the athanatist thesis; but I am somewhat disturbed by certain apparently well-authenticated psychic phenomena which seem to point to man’s survival of bodily death. Of the nature of that survival I profess agnosticism. Descriptions of “Summerland” (inconsistent and often absurd), even if they possess any objectivity, must be highly coloured by the subconsciousness of entranced mediums, who are very sensitive to suggestion. It is possible, even likely, that the Spiritualist’s interpretation of the phenomena in question is wholly incorrect. But here is a region which Rationalists should scientifically explore, and not scornfully shun as they so often do.

Whatever solutions of life’s riddles I may finally reach, I hope I shall remain loyal to the spirit of Rationalism. But is not Rationalist too ambitious a name for any human biped, still bearing the traces of his reptilian and mammalian ancestors in body and mind, to arrogate to himself? Let me rather say that I am a stumbling and bewildered wayfarer on what I hope is the path that leads to truth.

Mr. Vivian Phelips’s The Churches and Modern Thought is entitled to an expression of very real gratitude from me, for it caused me to throw the searchlight of logic into the “black-out” of priestcraft. The author, moreover, put into unforgettable words the doubts I had long held regarding the actual value of the faith in which I had been born and reared. Through the mists of a conventional tradition I walked out into the glorious sunlight of a mind free for ever from the chains of an outworn superstition. Other books of Rationalist tendency have been added to my shelves after pleasurable reading; yet I handle my copy of The Churches and Modern Thought with the loving care of one who holds a treasure indeed, for truly was it the veritable treasure chest of freedom, tolerance, and goodwill.

There was a time when the fact that I could distinguish between the sense of right and of wrong was sufficient in itself to induce me to assert the existence of a non-physical spiritual being. It was a queer interpretation for a perfectly simple physical feeling, but it arose out of sheer ignorance. I did not know how human beings had come to acquire these feelings. With an acquisition of that knowledge there has come also an understanding of how it arises that people interpret such feelings in that way. For me this resolved the problem. To-day I stand with those who see man as the creator of his own social evolution, and who recognize how society transforms him and his ideas. I see men as a well-knit group of living beings, evolved from groups of lower animal forms. Man’s rational ideas, his moral beliefs, his social organization, and his biological make-up have a connected history of evolution. It is in the struggle of this group with Nature, and with its own maladjustments, that light emerges and darkness is banished.

This view leads me to expect that all times are not equally propitious for the growth of science and for the spread of rational ideas. Times of social expansion and steady development correspond to periods of the growth of a rational outlook and a humane spirit. Times of social contraction and of human disorganization are also those of mysticism and irrationality. The great liberal tradition of the nineteenth century was the reflection of a world of social well-being. Rational ideas took root and flourished. To-day in the midst of world-wide social crisis liberty of thought, speech, and writing becomes restricted. To attempt to justify an irrational society leads straight to irrationalism.

I was born in the latter days of this liberal tradition, and adopted and reflected its outlook. Accordingly I came under the influence of the creative minds of that period as they were busy formulating the new thought, the new ethics, and the new scientific outlook, just as the younger generation to-day in their own way are vitally concerned with the specific problems of the present critical social period and come under the influence of those who concentrate their minds upon them.

What were the forces that directed the thoughts of so many of the young men of my period along Rationalist lines? There was first the glaring inconsistency in the theory of those who privately professed a high moral and religious attitude of a mystical nature, and their public practice on matters that affected their worldly welfare. Secondly, there was the very obvious prescientific nature of Holy Writ based on an outmoded view of man and the universe. In our minds and in our schoolboy discussions we re-fought the battles of Huxley and the bishops, as the essential truth of the evolutionary ideas gripped us.

To-day the younger generation can browse among a type of literature that in my day would have broken my mental back under its intellectual weight. Reading of heavy books I found slow and difficult. Instead we listened spellbound to the discussions at street-corner meetings, to the battle of wits, to the struggle between rational attack and religious obscurantism. In those days Rationalism had the crusading spirit. Invariably someone would push a pamphlet or a well-thumbed second-hand copy of one of those marvellous sixpenny books issued by Watts. They were a revelation, handed on as they were by bootmakers, mechanics, carters, keen-eyed and sharp philosophers all—genuine and honest propagandists for the truth. It is difficult to convey the feeling of exhilaration with which one came away from such meetings—and not a word of politics mentioned, so significantly different from today. And so I was led on to Paine’s Age of Reason by hearing it quoted at a street meeting, and to Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. Finally, in my teens, when Joseph McCabe came to lecture in my native town on Evolution and Heredity, stripped of the mystical stuff by which my mind had been clogged, he found an expectant and receptive pupil.

From that stage onwards it is difficult to put one’s finger on any one book. I remember the effect produced on me by Wells’s First and Last Things. I remember what a gold mine the Thinker’s Library was for me; but it was not so much the blow imparted by any single book as the combined effect of a wave of rational expression that showed itself in the best of the literature of that day. It swept me on to wider fields, and for that reason I pay tribute to all those pioneers whose struggles and whose writings meant so much for me and my generation—T. H. Huxley, Watts, Bradlaugh, the early Wells, and lastly those unknown street-corner propagandists.

Pondering over what books have helped me towards Rationalism, I have to admit that few stand out. I pursued the path towards freedom of thought as a very lonely traveller until I was sent the Literary Guide from England a year ago. Before that the books I had discovered were usually those that merely confirmed or amplified opinions which with much difficulty I had already formed. However, in the first place I remember that, following the mention of the word “evolution” at school, I discovered two now nameless elementary text-books that thrilled me—one on mammalian paleontology, the other on the comparative anatomy of vertebrates. These were scientifically and artistically more convincing than ever Genesis had been. The study of embryology and the intimate acquaintance with death and pain which my medical course gave me aroused doubts about beneficent deities in general; and the helplessness of Sunday divinity students when asked to defend the views suggested in the study books of the Student Christian Movement caused the rejection of Christianity in particular.

A more critical attitude towards international politics and towards social inequalities was engendered by residence in South Africa; but no books contributed much until I met the Literary Guide. This periodical prepared the way for a much less prejudiced perusal of Left Book Club literature, and I found to my amazement that Marxism was a closely-argued theory based on actual happenings. Even if I am not converted, I feel that my outlook has been considerably broadened.

I was influenced in my twenties by W. E. H. Lecky and H. T. Buckle. The former considered himself a Christian, I believe; the latter was a Theist. Lecky, according to George Eliot, appealed to those with “a spongy texture of mind, that gravitates strongly to nothing,” and which “is staunch for the utmost liberty of private haziness.” A young man emerging from the sentimental solecism of “liberal religion” is bound to be of that order. Lecky’s facts, however, penetrated after his dubious moralizings had been forgotten. The dismal diorama of Christian history sowed in the mind an impression that no divine wisdom had gone that way. Buckle’s contention that scepticism was a condition of progress was indeed a seminal thought to a young inquiring mind. “Until doubt began progress was impossible, for the advance of civilization solely depends upon the acquisitions made by the human intellect and on the extent of their diffusion.” Those golden words were a mighty lever prizing open the hard shell of Orthodoxy. A third book that stabbed my mind awake was Thomas Hardy’s Two on a Tower. It is a good introduction to the Wessex novelist. It suggested to me that I was indeed in a menacing universe, but not one of those “little children weak” of whom I long ago sang in Sunday school—that I was earth-bound, not sky-born.

At the age of sixteen I was being prepared for con­firmation in the Church of England. I cannot remember that at that time there was any doubt in my mind about the creed I was being taught. It meant nothing to me; it was neither real nor unreal— I just did not think about it at all. I was confirmed, and soon forgot about religion; I neither doubted nor believed the Gospels or the Creeds. Soon, however, a chance visit to a second-hand bookstall changed all my outlook, for I picked up for twopence a copy of Huxley‘s Lectures and Essays. This incisive analysis of such Gospel narratives as the miracle of the Gadarene swine, his courteous yet devastating rejoinders to Dr. Wace and other apologists, his broad scientific survey, opened up my young mind to a line of thought which had never before occurred to me, and which held the promise of breathless interest. From that day I became a Rationalist. I read every book I could get on religion, on Biblical criticism, and on the conflict of science and religion. Eventually I joined the R. P. A. I have, needless to say, remained a Rationalist; but I often wish that I could revert to my former state of mind, so that I could once more enjoy the intense pleasure of reading Huxley again for the first time. Since then I have read and studied many books bearing on religion and Rationalism. Of them perhaps the greatest impression made on my mind has been by Sir James Jeans’s The Mysterious Universe, which brings home to its readers with extraordinary vividness the utterly insignificant position of mankind in the universe as a whole. Nobody can contemplate the facts of the universe candidly and continue to be an adherent of the fantastic creeds of Christianity: it is not without significance that the first branch of science to be persecuted by the Church was Astronomy.

I was an earnest Methodist, but, not being a mystic could not enjoy prayer. In 1878, as I entered a bookshop to buy a gift for a Wesleyan minister, the title of Draper’s History of the Conflict between Science and Religion suggested its suitability. I wrote the minister’s name in the book, and then read it. As I knew thoroughly Whateley’s evidences, I expected to find that Christianity overcame scientific arguments; but I soon discovered that Draper suited me, a student of science, better than he would the minister. So I kept the book. My careful reading of it started this thought: If organized Christianity has done such deeds and still teaches such lessons, there must be something seriously wrong with it. What is the mischief? That question arranged my destiny. With but little spare time, I was now watchful. Huxley’s triumph over his opponents in the Nineteenth Century, followed up by the R. P. A. Cheap Reprints, assisted my pilgrim’s progress. Robertson’s invaluable solid works and the R. P. A. publications were the interpreter’s library in the House Beautiful of Rationalism.

Almost any science honestly thought over will make a Freethinker. Geology, astronomy, biology, psychology, and history are evident approaches. One of my friends was shaken out of his dogmatic slumber by chemistry. A Rationalist fairly equipped will find his conclusions strengthened most by noting the futility of orthodox defences, if he has the patience to read books which are sure to be thrust upon him by his friends should his opinions be known.

My gradual departure from Christianity was due to the fact that it was found not to be a practical guide. The later formation of a life philosophy was a much slower process, which is still far from finished.

Reared in the Nonconformist atmosphere of a Yorkshire manufacturing town in the 1878-97 period, and equipped with a Board-school education and a few years’ apprenticeship to a trade, I decided at the age of nineteen that there must be better places in the world to live in and more congenial ways of earning a living. So after two years in southern England I spent four in various parts of Ireland, where I first realized “how these Christians love each other.” Returning to England, with incipient scepticism in my mind, I read Not Guilty (Robert Blatchford), after which I ceased to take any further interest in religion. In 1917 I was in Dar-es-salam, enjoying a brief respite from chasing German columns round Africa, when an acquaintance, hearing me bewailing the lack of literature in the place, brought me a few copies of the Literary Guide, which interested me so that I did not stop until I had read them all from cover to cover. After the war I became a regular reader and eventually a member of the R. P. A. Two books published by Messrs. Watts (Ingersoll’s Lectures and Essays and The Churches and Modern Thought) effectually cured me of any lingering belief in the orthodox Deity. I have greatly extended my reading since then, and if I have now acquired a little more knowledge and a saner outlook on life I owe it in the first place to that casual acquaintance in Dar-es-salam who introduced the R. P. A. to my notice.

I was brought up as a Congregationalist, with which body my father was connected, and in his spare time was a lay preacher. From Congregationalism we drifted into Unitarianism, and I read a good many books by noted Unitarians. I also read some books issued by the Theistic Church, which was situated, I believe, in Swallow Street, Piccadilly, London.

A friend of my father’s lent him four fine books by Samuel Laing, which I also read, and they impressed me considerably. My next step was Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason, after which I devoured many of the books and pamphlets of Ingersoll. By this time I was well on the way to intellectual freedom, and it did not take me long to imbibe the works of such men as the great Bradlaugh, Foote, Lloyd, Cohen, and the like. Finally, nearly fifty years ago, I became a convinced Freethinker, and once contributed an article to the Freethinker entitled “Christianity Reconsidered”; in addition to which some years ago I did a little lecturing on the Secularist platform in the North of England.

In all my reading, for and against, since that time I have never once seen any reason to return to the Christian fold, and advancing years still find me a thoroughgoing unbeliever as far as Christianity is concerned.

Your announcement of a series of articles on “Books which Made Me a Rationalist” surprised me a little, as it implied that books were an indispensable factor in influencing towards Rationalism. Probably they are; but one has only to look around at the depressing sight of educated people still weltering in the fantasies of past ages to become an out-and-out Rationalist. Of books, the Bible, read with an unprejudiced and reasoning mind, would be hard to beat in shattering beliefs instilled in childhood. Yet we have so-called brainy people getting over such sentences in it as: “I the Lord thy God am a jealous God visiting the iniquity, etc.” (attributing to a Divinity to be worshipped one of the most deplorable of human weaknesses) and “God so loved the world that he gave his only begotten Son to redeem the world and bring sinners to repentance,” without apparently any incongruity in such beliefs presenting itself to their minds. One can only come to the conclusion that there is still much to learn about the human mind, with its various kinks. I think it was Rabbie Burns who decided that there was no getting at its “hooks and its crooks,” and gave it up as a “problem that wud puzzle the Deevil.”

My Rationalistic outlook has not been due entirely to books. Against a background of modern Quakerism, with its breadth of vision, its humanity, and its abhorrence of the grosser forms of religious ritual, my natural scep­ticism developed at an early age. Inconspicuous observations relating to middle-class morality in such books as Mr Ward’s What is this Life? and Oliver Baldwin’s Unborn Son came too late to share the credit implied in the title to this series of personal experiences, though on looking back I seem to remember a strong negative reac­tion to Henry Drummond’s Natural Law, which was handed to me during the Great War in the hope, I think, of checking an incipient heresy presumably becoming noticeable.

R. P. A. publications belong to a later period, and served to clarify and to strengthen an attitude attributable as much to direct observation as to the influence of any one or group of authors. It would not, however, be fair to exclude specific reference to several of these. Llewelyn Powys’s Pathetic Fallacy and Havelock Ellis’s Morals, Manners, and Men have both left strong impressions, as did also Mr. H. G. Wells’s First and Last Things and Mr. Morrison’s Who Moved the Stone?

Ethel Mannin’s Confessions and Impressions was another frank biographical work which came within the first category, though, when viewed in the light of her second confessional effort written a few years later, one detects an ominous and thinly disguised retrenchment in the author’s youthful confidence.

I must plead guilty to complete neglect of the earlier Rationalist classics, such as The Age of Reason and the works of Rousseau, Voltaire, Ingersoll, and others, prefer­ring to profit by the labours of their modern exponents, of which Joad’s Guide to Modern Thought and Guide to Modern Wickedness might be considered as typical.

These few outstanding books and a host of others have contributed to my present outlook and belief; have strengthened and given me courage in an attitude which, through unaided observation of all I see around me, must eventually have prevailed.

I am perhaps one of the few persons on earth who was converted to Rationalism by the words of a Congregationalist minister. I was thirteen years old when I read in some forgotten book by the Rev. Lyman Abbott (who was editor of The Outlook, and had succeeded to the pulpit of Henry Ward Beecher) that God need not necessarily be thought of as a personal Deity. A great light suddenly burst on a mind which, if immature, was at least awake “Why, then,” I said to myself, “if God is not a person, he need not necessarily exist at all!” I never from that moment believed in a God of any sort.

Two years later I discovered Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe, which completed the transition. Of the two most enlightening phrases I have ever read or heard, phrases which opened up enormous vistas of related thought, one was in that book: “Ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny.” With that clue the whole of evolution lay revealed to my mind. The other pregnant phrase was Leonardo’s “The earth is a moon of the sun,” which did a similar service in regard to astronomy.

I still did not know that I was not unique in my godlessness. One day my father, a surgeon whom I had never known to enter a house of worship, nevertheless took me to task in regard to some anti-religious comment I had uttered. He questioned me about my theological beliefs, and said with horror: “You’re no better than an Atheist!”

It was the final guerdon. Instead of being shocked I hugged the accusation to me. There was a word for what I believed; there must be others who believed the same things! I walked out of the house and down the street proudly saying to myself: “I’m an Atheist; I’m an Atheist!” I have been one ever since.

Educated at a Clergy Daughters’ School, I imbibed the superstitions which were taught there. After leaving I partook of the Sacrament, ignorant that it was a survival of cannibalism in a refined form. Later I read The Origin of Species and The Descent of Man, and of course discredited forthwith the apple fairy tale. In 1891, when I had reached my thirty-second year, I married a Rationalist, who was a prolific writer, two of his most notable books being The Evolution of the English House and Church and Manor (the latest edition of the first-named was broadcast). On one occasion I remarked that he would never induce me to give up my belief in the orthodox God. He replied: “I shall not try.” I guess he was thinking what a revelation was in store for me when I had read some of his enlightening and beloved books.

The first work which really disturbed my faith was The Golden Rough, which was followed by a re-reading of the Bible; but it finally crashed after the perusal of some of the famous books written by Haeckel, Spencer, Bradlaugh, Huxley, Allen, Phelips, Schopenhauer, Paine, Wells, Clodd, etc.

After the death of my beloved husband in 1933 I met Miss Clara L. Thompson, author of the standard work on Jane Austen. She persuaded me to become a member of the R. P. A., and in February of 1935, when she died, I wrote in the Literary Guide an obituary notice in which I acknowledged my indebtedness to her.

I was brought up in a country district in North Wales. As a child I attended the local Independent chapel. In the Sunday school I received a thorough grounding in Biblical knowledge. I found the Bible, especially the Old Testament, interesting. I was not troubled by doubts.

When I came of age I went to work at Llandudno. I shortly after joined the Welsh Congregational church in that town. My Sunday-school teacher was a man of fairly broad views. He used to take two or three of us in turn home to tea with him on Sunday afternoons. On these occasions we rummaged about his bulky book­ shelves. He said to me one Sunday: “Here is a book that ought to interest you; read it, and you will see that there are more ways than one of looking at Evolution.” He handed me Drummond’s Natural Law in the Spiritual World. I read it. If, as my Sunday-school teacher had suspected, I was inclined to doubt certain doctrines, the reading of Drummond’s book sent me “fifty miles further.” I wanted to hear “the other side.” I borrowed The Origin of Species from the local library; but, after reading about thirty pages, I abandoned it, as being too dry and its style uninviting. Shortly afterwards I bought for sixpence Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. I was more at home with this book: I knew my Bible and could follow the author’s argument. Then came the R. P. A. Sixpenny Reprints—and the deluge!

The book which affected me originally was Bertrand Russell’s What I Believe, though when I first read it I completely misunderstood it, thinking it merely Socialist propaganda for the Labour Government, which had come into power that year (1924). I read it again about a year later, when I came across this passage: “Conscience consists of vague reminiscences of precepts heard in early youth, so that it is never wiser than its possessor’s nurse or mother.” I stopped here and re-read the passage several times, and began to realize that there was really no outside authority to tell me what was right or wrong, and that it was all a matter of tradition more or less imperfectly handed on. From that day the residue of such religious beliefs as I had absorbed in youth and at school rapidly fell from me.

The next book that carried me further into Rationalism was Winwood Reade’s masterpiece, The Martyrdom of Man. I think I learnt more from this book than from any other before or since; its originality and intense intellec­tual interest inspired me for long afterwards.

The book that completed my education, though many others have doubtless helped, was Sir Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology. I felt that my whole mind had expanded in throwing off the last traces of clogging superstition.

I, like the great majority of the older members of the R. P. A., was brought up in an atmosphere of unadulterated orthodoxy. The whole household attended family prayers every morning, and on Sundays the family, duly attired in such emblems of respectability as top-hats, always attended “morning service” and frequently “evening service” as well. That any decent person might be an “Infidel” never entered our minds, and even Nonconformity was regarded as the rebellious attitude of “Radicals” who had no respect for tradition or authority.

I cannot remember exactly how doubts about the doctrines of Christianity first entered my mind, but I know that long before I had read The Origin of Species, or any other book dealing with Evolution, I had realized that the Biblical creation story was incredible. Of controversial writings my first recollection is the debate in the Nineteenth Century between Gladstone and Huxley about the credibility of miracles, and I can still remember how impressed I was by the superiority of Huxley’s arguments in connection with the matter of the Gadarene swine. Gladstone never seemed to face the issues posed by his opponent, but merely to be displaying his erudition about the topography of Palestine and the philology of its place-names. It was about this time that I got hold of Samuel Laing’s Modern Science and Modern Thought, A Modern Zoroastrian, etc., and thenceforth my opinions ceased to be orthodox, though, like many others of my age, my unorthodoxy remained negative and vague and I merely lost all interest in religion. I realized that much was untrue, and a great deal more the mere repetition of meaningless rites and jargon.

As a soldier I attended church parades when my turn came round for that duty, but, like most of my colleagues, never went to church unless I was spending Sunday in some house where non-attendance would grossly have shocked my host. But in the year 1912 I was attended in a long illness by a nurse who by chance showed me a copy of the Literary Guide, and now that I had more leisure for reading I began seriously to study the question whether the doctrines of Christianity were true. Except that my reason had always revolted against the doctrine that a beneficent God had condemned all mankind to perpetual torment because its remote ancestor had eaten a forbidden fruit and had been induced to forgive some of them only on condition of his only Son being put to a painful and ignominious death, I had no convictions about any particular Christian doctrine. I now, in R. P. A. editions and otherwise, read such books as Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, Lecky’s History of Rationalism and European Morals, Buckle’s History of Civilization in England, Draper’s Conflict of Religion and Science and Intellectual Development of Europe, Motley’s Rise of the Dutch Republic, Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, several of J. M. Robertson’s excellent books, and innumerable other treatises, many written by clerical authors whose quibbles and evasions were the most conclusive evidence of the weakness of their case. Long before I had finished all these and the last Great War had put a stop to serious study I was converted to Rationalism, and I remain eternally grateful to the R. P. A. for the assistance I received from its admirable publications, including the Literary Guide.

Though I was never “confirmed,” until about my twentieth year I considered myself an earnest Christian in the Church of England. Nevertheless I was not entirely free of doubt owing to the mysteries introduced into what seemed to me should be a simple and straightforward matter. While still at school I had ceased to repeat those words in the creed that express belief in the Holy Ghost, since that conception was beyond my understanding. I was also puzzled by the obvious injustice, pain, and suffering that existed in the world. I could not reconcile this with the conception of an omniscient, omnipotent, and all-merciful God; and no lesser deity was acceptable.

About that time I became acquainted with the writings of Samuel Laing, T. H. Huxley, and Charles Darwin. These started the process of conversion, which was continued a year or two later by Mill’s On Liberty. The nature of my employment at this stage left me much alone, with considerable time for reading and thought. It was then I met with the two books that I deem to have had the greatest share in influencing me to Rationalism. I refer to a reprint in book form of the controversy between T. H. Huxley and W. E. Gladstone in the pages of the Nineteenth Century and Winwood Reade’s The Martyrdom of Man.

At this time too some of the publications of the Rationalist Press Association first reached me. I read Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology, all I could get of T. H. Huxley’s works, Haeckel’s The Riddle of the Universe, and Vivian Phelips’s The Churches and Modern Thought. All these and everything I have read since, including works such as Apologia Pro Vita Sua, composed with a very different intention, have but served to confirm me in the belief of the rightness of Rationalism.

I was reared and nurtured in the Christian tradition, but as soon as I began to think for myself I was assailed by doubts as to its truth and value. Therefore I early resolved to find out the facts of the case. My first discovery was that sound and closely-reasoned work, Mr. Joseph McCabe’s The Existence of God. It shed a clear light on my difficulties, and I loved its telling arguments, all so fair and reasonable. Anyone who reads this book with an unbiased mind is already on the way to being a Rationalist.

Next I bought another book which to my mind ranks second only to that of Mr. McCabe—Vivian Phelips’s The Churches and Modern Thought. This is a grand work, and after reading it my appetite for further Rationalistic works steadily increased. Then I purchased a book which I treasure and have read many times—Mr. Robert Arch’s Whence, Whither, and Why? This is undoubtedly one of the finest expositions of Rationalist thought. After reading it my doubts had disappeared, since I had now reached the state of absolute conviction at which all must aim. However, I then, while browsing in a bookshop, picked up a real treasure—Sir Richard Burton’s The Kasidah. Words can hardly describe my joy on finding this magnificent work. How clear is the note of confidence shown in Burton’s appreciation of the rational attitude towards all things; what strength of conviction is portrayed in his beautiful stanzas.

I feel quite confident that any fair-minded student who is earnestly seeking truth is bound, after reading the four books I have mentioned, to reject any attitude of mind except that of Rationalism.

Having always had an intense interest in anything to do with Natural History, I read from quite early days all the books I could on this subject. My parents were careful censors of my reading, and would have been astonished had they known that these apparently innocent books sowed the first seeds of Rationalism in my mind. Many of the writers, frequently parsons, finished their chapters by drawing attention to the evidence of the hand of a Benevolent Creator in the economy of the creature described. It was not long before my own observations compelled me to differ from them in the conclusions arrived at.

Apart from the extraordinary remarks sometimes made by the preachers I had to listen to every Sunday, the Bible itself was a very real factor in driving me definitely towards Rationalism. By the time I was eighteen I had formed in my mind the skeleton of a system of evolution. I left home at nineteen years of age, and then, unfettered by parental censorship, obtained a copy of Darwin‘s Origin of Species. Here were many of my own clumsy thoughts worked out in detail and supported by masses of evidence. Though I have read many books since, I have never had reason to alter my opinion that it is more reasonable to suppose, with a completely open mind, a system of cause and effect rather than a creation started by tricks of a magician.

I have been greatly interested in the many contributions from Rationalists detailing the books which influenced them. All the same, I have been rather surprised at the amount of hard reading some required for conversion, and at their consequent painful break with religion. In my own case the matter was exceedingly simple, and I never had the least heartache. At the age of ten or thereabouts I happened to be reading the Arabian Nights at the same time that I was being egged on to read the Bible by some of the evangelizing youths in the higher classes at the Methodist school I attended. I have never forgotten the impression made upon me then that there really was no difference between the story of Jesus being wafted through the air by a devil, and of Aladdin being carried about in the same way by a geni. I use that impression now as a very strong argument against the truth of the Gospel story. Later I used to have pages from Ingersoll’s pamphlets read to me by an American, so that by the time I was fifteen I no longer believed in religion; and I am bound to say I never suffered any spiritual wrench in the change. My conversion was completed, if that was necessary, by Blatchford’s God and My Neighbour, and completely confirmed by the many replies to that work by G. K. Chesterton, Frank Ballard, J. Warschauer, and other indignant Christians, which I read. From Blatchford I learned of Haeckel and G. W. Foote, and so joined the R. P. A., and later the N. S. S. It did not take me long after that to find out John M. Robertson, Joseph McCabe, Huxley, Tyndall, Büchner, Bradlaugh, Chapman Cohen, and many other great fighters. They completed my education (or rather helped to, for I have a lot to learn yet), but they did not actually make me a Freethinker. I still think it was my luck in reading the Arabian Nights at the same time as I read the Bible.

I must admit that I should feel a touch of really malicious pleasure if I could truthfully answer this inquiry into the books whose influence directed me along the path of Reason by listing a few of the best-known works of religious apologetics, but alas I cannot hope to pretend that any such volumes ever exercised an influence over my mind. I think actually that I was a heretic from childhood, for I can remember going to church when quite small and thinking “This is nonsense” when the clergyman in the pulpit dilated on his own particular version of the eternal verities of the Christian faith. Yet if I was a heretic in those days I was an exceedingly ill-informed one. My doubts were hesitating and chaotic, my beliefs shadowy and uncertain. And the first book which put me on the track of something better was a small work by the late C. T. Gorham, which was sent to me when I replied to an R. P. A. advertisement in a literary journal. It quickly opened my eyes to reality, and before I knew what was happening to me I was devouring everything about Rationalism which I could lay hands on. In those days, I remember, I read Sir George Greenwood’s The Faith of an Agnostic (a calm and temperate work which should be included, one of these days, in the Thinker’s Library), The Riddle of the Universe, and various books by those stormy petrels of Freethought, Mr. Joseph McCabe and Mr. Chapman Cohen. Then, in a little bookshop in the Horsefair, Bristol, I came upon the Literary Guide and the Freethinker, and I purchased each issue eagerly. Now at last I was free of the musty old obsessions of religious dogma. I must add that I am deeply grateful to the many authors whose clear thinking has aided me since then, but my gratitude goes out most of all to Mr. Gorham. I wish that I could recall the title of his little book which first made Rationalism known to me, for to it I owe what has in recent years been the most interesting and delightful of my many tasks—the exercise of my pen in the pleasant fields of Rationalist journalism.

[The title of the book referred to is A Plain Man’s Plea for Rationalism.—Ed.]

The majority of R.P.A. members appear to be converts from Christianity, some of whom retain traces of the presuppositions of that creed about the Gospel Jesus, teleology, and immortality—an influence that can be seen in the views of Loisy, McCabe, and other converts. As I never believed in supernaturalism, I cannot record any slow and painful conversion, although trained in a Church of England environment. Being the eldest son of the squire of the village near Stratford-on-Avon in which the father of the poet Shakespeare was born, I received the usual orthodox education at a private school, Winchester, and Oxford. But even as a child I was only interested in what was true—in facts, not in fiction—and before I was ten years old I had definitely placed Jesus and Christian miracles and dogmas in the latter class, along with Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress and Hans Andersen’s Fairy Tales. By that time I had seen most of the plays of Shakespeare acted, had studied them in Knight’s edition of eight vols., and been impressed by the poet’s obvious scepticism, which, with his distaste for Puritanism, can be traced to Marlowe’s influence (see Christopher Marlowe, by John Bakeless, p. 278 et seq.).

When I went to Winchester in 1888 Shakespeare, Darwin, and Bradlaugh were the heroes of my creed, and soon afterwards I was influenced by the rational sanity of Lucretius, Epicurus, and Epictetus. Next the friendship of Darwin’s grandson introduced me to the gifted sons of the great naturalist. Consequently, on reaching Oxford in 1893 I did not hesitate to tell my friend Michael Furse, then Junior Dean of Trinity, now Bishop of St. Albans, that I declined to “keep term” by “chapels” because I had no belief in supernaturalism. At this period I studied Cassels’s Supernatural Religion, the start of a life-long investigation of Christian origins. But it was the example of Bradlaugh’s heroic battle for freedom of thought more than any book that confirmed me in my innate trust in reason and dislike of blind belief, and I have found Rationalism an immense aid in the battle of life and the only safe guide to a happy existence.

A reading and study of Science and Health with “Key to the Scriptures” was the direct cause of my pilgrimage to that safe, quiet haven of reasoning which made me a Rationalist. This book, with its mixture of balderdash and wisdom, led me, on one of my frequent trips to town, to Foyle’s Book Shop in Charing Cross Road. In answer to my inquiry for a book that would instruct me into the history of the Bible the salesman, after discreet questioning, recommended The Story of the Bible (the Thinker’s Library edition, now 1s. 3d.). Finding Macleod Yearsley’s book engrossing and informative, it led me to The Martyrdom of Man and opened up to my searching mind the priceless treasures of the Thinker’s Library. The monthly Literary Guide and the weekly Freethinker brought me into touch with Mr. Chapman Cohen’s lucid and candid writings; and, although I have a steadily-mounting number of “expensive” books, the eighty volumes of the Thinker’s Library take pride of place on my shelves.

“Like snow on the desert’s dusty face,” the literary gymnastics of Mary Baker Eddy melted away under the steady glow of Rationalist reading, and there remains only the appreciation that her Key to the Scriptures did really unlock the door for me.

It is not easy to write of the books that made me a Rationalist; I would rather describe those which confirmed the Rationalistic outlook which was mine even in the days of my uneasy faith. Although my home was a religious one, I was only half-heartedly in agreement with the dogmas in which my parents believed. Then somehow I got hold of a copy of Darwin’s Origin of Species and began to undergo a process of intellectual spring-cleaning. My imagination was fired by the exciting new idea of life ever unfolding itself in new and beautiful patterns.

The works of such writers as Julian Huxley and J. B. S. Haldane were later influences on my thought, but it was Darwin’s classic statement of the case for Evolution which provided the first and most important mental stimulus.

Normally reflective natures, I believe, are led to Rationalism less by the direct guidance of books than by actual contact with vital problems of belief, morality, and significance, upon which some clear light becomes imperative. Under this compulsion help is eagerly sought from other minds, and thus books play an essential but a secondary role in the process of liberation. It was by some such path that I was led to Freethought.

Brought up in the strict Baptist sect, I accepted inevitably the whole clumsy cosmogony of that literalist creed; but before entering my ’teens I became acutely aware of difficulties of doctrine, which grew greater as my faculties quickened. Salvation by faith, for instance, seemed monstrous. Why should even the arch-Atheist Bradlaugh be condemned to Hell-fire if his conscience found the proofs of Christianity unconvincing? Who but the Creator could be blamed if His whole scheme of a sinless world broke down so speedily? A hundred such questions—not suggested by books, but arising from the clash between creed and common sense—troubled my early adolescence. Parents and teachers had only reproofs or flimsy evasions to offer, and the pious books I encountered all blandly assumed the fundamentals on which I sought to be convinced. Desperately I turned to the Bible itself—”the Word of God”—and thus completed my religious undoing. Crudities, vague phrases, contradictions, abounded in its pages, with stories of savage slaughter and page on dreary page of ritual and “begettings.”

Groping for light, stumbling through swamps now but half remembered, I forsook the Baptist conventicles and vainly sought a resting-place in the Anglican Church, in Unitarianism—in any creed which would leave intact the tender figure of Christ. Like a seaward current, experience and observation bore me steadily further from the world of comforting ready-made beliefs. With few friends and scant knowledge of books, those early formative years were strangely unhappy.

Then some fortunate chance led me to Sartor Resartus. The book was a revelation. Here was a heroic soul who scorned to bow down in the House of Rimmon; one whose prayer was for “Truth—though the heavens fall!” Carlyle became for me the first of a great fellowship of freedom, among whose leaders were Emerson, Shelley, Matthew Arnold, and that emotional genius of a single book, Olive Schreiner. My Ishmaelite days were ended.

In November, 1914, my ship was in Suva Harbour, Fiji, awaiting news of the German cruisers Scharnhorst and Gueisenau, which were somewhere in the Pacific. The Captain, whom I had always supposed to be an orthodox believer, happened to discuss certain religious questions with me. When I told him that I tried to preserve an open mind on these matters he took me to his cabin and handed me White’s History of the Warfare between Science and Theology. “Take your time over it,” he counselled, “and read it carefully.” I did so, and as a result of my reading I was compelled to discard all religious beliefs. Since then I have read extensively, including the works of Darwin, Spencer, Haeckel, McCabe, Phelips, Grant Allen, Clodd, Laing, and others; but it was White’s classic treatment of the conflict between science and religion that made me a Rationalist.

I first heard of the R. P. A. through my friendship with the late Rt. Hon. J. M. Robertson both as a Liberal Parliamentary candidate and a Shakespearean scholar and critic. I almost immediately became a member of the R. P. A.— not because of any particular book, but because reason and common sense had, so to speak, already got me there. Also I had found the arguments of Thomas Henry Huxley, truly an intellectual hero, most convincing when I came across them in various magazines and books, and later on in Life and Letters, by his son.

I was brought up in the Free Church of Scotland. My parents were strict Calvinists. In my twenties I became intensely religious, and remained in that frame of mind for a number of years until I read The Riddle of the Universe. I still remember the rude shock I got when reading and digesting the contents of that volume. All my former beliefs in the Christian faith and the supernatural were ruthlessly torpedoed. Driven by logic, I began to analyse, at first perhaps with a certain amount of prejudice, the doctrines of the Christian religion. I found in the Bible that the God of Moses was an anthropomorphic Deity— a sort of glorified tribal potentate imbued with human frailties and human weaknesses. For instance, he could be moved to anger and jealousy, and commanded us to worship him and pray to him. At this stage I was forced to the conclusion that these traits were incompatible with the character of a Deity.

For years I have been a keen student of astronomy, and this science more than any other convinced me with staggering reality that the universe is hostile to life. Animal life as we know it is the by-product of an accident. Our earth was formed or dropped into a temperate zone. If it was nearer the sun we should be frizzled up by high temperature, and if our planet was further away in space intense cold would make life impossible. These facts alone showed me clearly how insignificant is life when compared with the countless galaxies of universes moving in stately formation with inconceivable velocity through endless space.

True enough, the universe is governed by a set of laws perfect in their range of operation. I often ask myself the question, Is our so-called spiritual creator one of these laws— such, for instance, as the law of gravitation? Matthew Arnold said that there is a power in the world which makes for righteousness. But would it not be grotesque and a farrago of utter nonsense to pray to and worship gravitation? Yet our view of the spiritual Deity may be just as absurd and fantastic. I cannot conceive the logic of worshipping an abstract being.

My analytical reasoning about the attributes of the Christian God was the main cause of making me a Rationalist. Of course I have read other books, such as The Nature of Man, The Origin of Species, and several of Mr. Joseph McCabe‘s works; but, as I have already said, it was The Riddle of the Universe which opened my eyes to the illusion of the Christian doctrine of salvation, and which made me think for myself and apply my reason to the problems of life and death.

My first contact with the Rationalist Movement was at the age of nineteen or twenty when I answered an R. P. A. advertisement in the Press. In reply I received a copy of the Literary Guide and particulars of Rationalist books, and soon after I purchased copies of the Rationalist Annual, The Christian Hell (by Mrs. H. Bradlaugh Bonner), and Selected Prose Works of Shelley. My Quaker upbringing and education had already introduced me to the problems of tithe and the disestablishment and disendowment of the Church of England, and this Rationalist literature thus fell on fertile soil. I next obtained Prof. J. B. Bury’s A History of the Freedom of Thought, which cleared much nonsense from my mind. I followed this with the Home University Library book on The History of Philosophy and Bertrand Russell’s Problems of Modern Philosophy. The vigorous challenge of Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian dissipated many Christian cobwebs, and the writings of the late J. M. Robertson on Biblical criticism and as to whether Jesus ever existed devastated assumptions which I had made theretofore. A book by Edward Clodd on Occultism enlightened me on the tricks and fraud in which modern magicians indulge, and Our New Religion by H. A. L. Fisher exploded Christian Science. As soon as I was twenty-one I joined the Rationalist Press Association. Shortly after I fortunately came to London, where I was able to use the R. P. A. Library frequently. Books by Bertrand Russell, C. E. M. Joad, H. G. Wells, and others only confirmed my original decision and made me realize that, if the world is to progress, the position of reason in every aspect of life—morals, politics, and education— must be strengthened and increased.

I had the seeds of Rationalism in me before I read any books on the subject, as my father was a Broad Churchman and named me Maurice after Professor Denison Maurice, whom he admired greatly. As regards the books, some of my friends wonder at my long study of what is known as Comparative Religion. Well, that is due to a Rationalistic writer. While I was still at school my father recommended me to read carefully a now famous book on his shelves—Edward Clodd’s The Childhood of Religions. From this time I date my almost lifelong study of religions other than Christianity. Another work of my schooldays which has had a very long and great influence upon me is Plato’s Apology of Socrates. This we read at school as one of the classical Greek texts. I wonder now that our headmaster, who was an orthodox Anglican clergyman and a Prebendary of St. Paul’s, did not realize what “harm” he was doing; but of course we were intended to pay attention to the language and not to the thought! This, with many other excellent books made available to me later by the R. P. A., confirmed and matured me in my Rationalism.

It is surely an ironic comment upon educational competency that so few Rationalists, even during the years of triumphing Darwinism, owed to their schools and schoolmasters any kind of preparatory hint or approach to independent thinking and unfettered research. I can remember, when joining a class in higher mathematics, the hushed warning of a schoolfellow while he pointed to our instructor as a “known Agnostic.” The testing papers set by this Rationalist—the authority on “Determinants,” and afterwards Director of Studies at the Cape—denoting an almost incredible reliance upon the reasoning powers of fifteen-year-old schoolboys, together with my already acquired taste and fluency in geometric demonstrations, dispose me to ascribe a strong prior influence to such disciplines. The Greek genius for rational education reached me formatively through the Books of Euclid (!) inducing a fidelity to logical process, invaluable in future more elusive problems.

Amid those years of stormy controversy, when Gladstone and Huxley, Tyndall and Martineau, were getting to grips, the writings of Ernest Renan seemed to offer a felicitous pathway into the expanding territory of positive Rationalism. In that fine sketch of an epoch, his Marcus Aurelius, the portraiture of Celsus, earliest of anti-Christian critics, is typical of the values to be found in plenty throughout his ample contributions to modern thought and life. His Souvenirs de ma Jeunesse is a classic of the emergence out of authoritarian Catholicism into the “Religion of the Open Mind.” With delightful Gallic assurance he exclaims (see The Future of Science): “Had not Darwin discovered Evolution I would have done so.”

My position in this exposition seems to be different from that of any other contributor in so far as the books which led me on to the path towards Rationalism are books that do not exist. No, I am not an Irishman, having been brought up in a northern Scottish village in true Fundamentalist fashion. Being, however, always of an inquiring turn of mind, and being eager to discover the source of all the fundamental truths that had been soaked into my receptive brain, I was in the seventh heaven of delight when I found myself transported to a large town in England, with free access to one of the biggest libraries in the country. Now I would find out how my instructors came to discover what they called the truths of religion, and how God came to give the Bible to mankind to be their only true guide here and hereafter. Personally I had an idea of the Deity stretching his arm through the clouds to drop the sacred book somewhere, and I often wondered where the original volume was guarded. That, however, being rather a childish idea, I really wanted to know how man came to assert with such confidence that our Bible was the one and only true Word of God. Surely that would not be difficult to find out. At that time I had not the slightest sensation of doubt regarding the truth of what I actually believed. I simply desired to discover how, when, and in what manner the Almighty did manage to communicate these ideas to mankind. What a search I had! And what a disappointment!

Week after week I gave up my spare moments, and book after book about the Bible was eagerly searched, but not one was discovered that could give the slightest clue to what I was after. Any amount of information about how we got our Bible, when each part came to be written, the probable authors (with many differences of opinion), but never a single hint about how inspiration came to be implied or how any connection with the Deity was to be suspected. I felt extremely downhearted, but one day, in the reading-room of the Y. M. C. A., of which I was an enthusiastic member, I happened to come across an article in the magazine called Knowledge—now, I believe, extinct. I cannot remember what the subject was, but it gave a description of the well-known process called “Natural Selection.” I was immediately struck by the beautiful simplicity of the idea, and went home pondering. I think that from that moment my thoughts began to take a definite turn to the right. Was this, then, I wondered, how man came to be created, and, if so, was it the reason why no book could tell me how the Bible came to be looked upon as the Word of God, any more than the Koran or the London Times could. My mind thereafter swept over the whole range of religion and religions. Yes, this must be the only possible conclusion. As far as I could see, no foundation for those “infallibility” statements could be discovered because no foundation existed: everywhere dogmatic assertion on the one hand, and pure gullibility on the other. Only that, and nothing more.

Strangely enough, I owe my “initiation” into Rationalism to a clergyman. I was then about eighteen years of age and a student at the Royal College, Mauritius. The College possessed quite a fair library, mostly non-fiction. One day I was looking, more or less casually, over the shelves, picking out a book here and there at random, when the Rev. ——, the College lecturer in Divinity, who happened to be near me, pulled out a book and said: “Standley, here’s a book which I advise you to read,” It was Lecky’s History of the Rise and Influence of Rationalism in Europe. It was this book, more perhaps than any other, which first set me on the path to Freethought, and I have never looked back since. I am also very much indebted to Huxley’s essays (especially his controversies with Dean Wace, Gladstone, and others), Buckle’s History of Civilization, and Colonel Ingersoll’s lectures.

Apart, however, from the influence of various books, I have a most vivid recollection of a certain incident which made me realize what a hollow mockery religion very often is. I was spending a few weeks at Ruling, near Kewkiang, China. Ruling is, or was, a summer resort near the Yangtse Valley, and at the time I am speaking of (the year 1900) was much frequented in summer by Christian missionaries. There was a big meeting of the latter one day, and, having nothing else to do, I thought I would go and see what it was all about. The purpose of the meeting, I soon found out, was to try to settle a long outstanding dispute about the ownership of a certain property which was claimed by two or three different missionary societies. The meeting began in the usual way, with prayers in which God was asked to bless the deliberations of the conference, etc. Soon after the discussion started, however, it became plain that the rival factions were not a bit inclined to come to some mutually satisfactory arrangement, but meant to get the whole of what they claimed or nothing. The discussion developed into a sort of tavern brawl, in which the speakers hurled insults at one another. As for the Chairman, he was at his wits’ end, and all his efforts to restore order and decency proved unavailing. In fact, I thought any minute the speakers would have come to blows. At the conclusion of the meeting there were, of course, more prayers; and, judging by the suave tone of these prayers, anyone coming in then would have thought that nothing but peace, love, and harmony had prevailed throughout the meeting.

The books which helped to form the mind of an Indian were many, and it is difficult to select from them. Perhaps The Evolution of the Idea of God was the first, closely followed by Herbert Spencer’s Education and Bradlaugh’s little masterpiece, Humanity’s Gain from Unbelief. But I think that the book which served most to let fresh air penetrate the dungeon of false belief was Mr. Gowans Whyte’s The Religion of the Open Mind, and to this I feel doubly grateful, since it led to my becoming the R. P. A. Local Secretary for Madras Presidency.

Once established in this position, of course I went on reading. Letters from F. J. Gould, C. T. Gorham, and Vivian Phelips (all, alas, now no more) naturally led to a perusal of their works; but of my later reading it is Frazer’s Golden Bough that stands out above all other books like a Himalayan peak. Then there were The Universe of Science, which revealed the hollowness of the pretensions of Jeans and Eddington, Lord Morley’s On Compromise, which effectually checked any tendency to bitterness towards opposing ideas, and Wells’s Short History of the World, which helped towards a sense of proportion. Indeed, the books to which I owe a debt are almost innumerable. But I must, before I close, say a word of praise to the Literary Guide and the Rationalist Annual, which in their turn encouraged me to exercise my pen in the pages of Reason (Bombay); and now they keep me mentally fit for my continued journey through life.

I think of myself as a self-made rather than a book-made Rationalist; but it was a book which, more than forty years ago, led me to an unfamiliar thinking-path. Its title was Who Wrote the Bible?; its author Dr. Washington Gladden, a D. D. , I believe, and an American.

Reared in the atmosphere of straight Methodist orthodoxy, no question as to the completeness of Bible revelation and authority ever arose until, in the midst of bustling village Nonconformity, at nearer forty than thirty, enough questioning must have budded in my mind to make the title of that book attractive. Untrammelled cogitation about the most serious thing in my honest make-up led me, without further study of books upon the subject, to put to myself the question: Can it be so? I was an unafraid pursuer. I gave nothing up, but in the course of my pursuit many beliefs gave me up.

I was a loser of course, but found myself more of a gainer. It was a great experience to be delivered from thraldom. Long ago I ceased to say “I have altered my mind,” having meanwhile found that I believed nothing and disbelieved nothing by a mere act of will.

I have yet to find that any belief which is vitally important is irrational, and I am a believer in simple salvations of various sorts, for individuals and for groups—right up to the world group. As was my centenarian mother, I am an unchoosing slave of conception of duty, and so, if obliged to confess, have to dub myself an obedient and therefore religious Atheist, without merit because compelled.

My boyhood’s days were spent in Dunedin, a stronghold of Presbyterianism. Through teaching in Sunday school I was soon able to quote chapter and verse for all possible and impossible happenings. When I left the South I became the authority between Christians and doubters. After one successful encounter a man lent me The Churches and Modern Thought, and my mental transformation was immediate and complete. The social results were quite entertaining. Devout friends could not understand my changed attitude, nor the decision with which I announced it. For me it meant a new heaven and a new earth, and my enthusiasm equalled my enlightenment. That book enabled me to take an intelligent view of the world and gave me a broad foundation for the game and play of life. I joined the R. P. A. and read other books referred to in Vivian Phelips’s masterpiece. I lived in a country town, and the arrival of the Literary Guide was an event to which I looked forward with the greatest expectation. In those days—twenty-five years ago—William Archer’s articles and those of Adam Gowans Whyte were especially attractive, while to-day “Protonius” and Ernest Thurtle receive first consideration.

I read one of Clodd’s works, and immediately wrote for “everything Clodd has written.” I revelled especially in his Story of Creation and his Pioneers of Evolution. In addition to those mentioned the books which made me a Rationalist were Adam Gowans Whyte’s Natural History of Evil and The Religion of the Open Mind, Grant Allen’s Evolution of the Idea of God, McCabe’s The Church and the People, Sir Arthur Keith’s Religion of a Darwinist, Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, and Langdon Davies’s Man and His Universe. These form, I think, an all-comprehensive group, providing in their several ways the necessary information for a satisfactory philosophy of life, while the literary charm and temperate exposition provide entertainment of the highest possible quality.

The transition from my orthodox Christian youth to Rationalist middle-age has been such a slow but steady growth that I could not say precisely when I became a Rationalist. Equally difficult is it to determine what books influenced that growth. In common with other factors of environment, much of my earlier reading must have been assimilated subconsciously, and was therefore an unconscious influence.

As a young man I read two books which greatly impressed me and probably did more than any others to open my eyes to realities and liberate my mind from conventional mythologies. The first was Buckle’s History of Civilisation in England. I still remember how impressed I was by both the novelty and the logic of the contention that the decadence of Spain was mainly due to the Church. This was given as an example of the more general theory that scepticism stimulated, while faith retarded, the progress of civilization. The second book was Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man. This was my first volume of the Thinker’s Library, and it proved an appropriate introduction: it made me think. Subsequently other books played their parts in furthering my intellectual emancipation; but to mention all of them would occupy too much space. I must, however, pay tribute to H. G. Wells’s The Outline of History, his The Work, Wealth, and Happiness of Mankind, and his The Science of Life (the last-named in collaboration with Julian Huxley and G. P. Wells). These three works present a splendid exposition of coordinated knowledge— history, sociology, and biology— as a foundation for the Rationalist philosophy.

May I assume that the word “books” is wide enough to cover periodicals? For it was the Literary Guide which influenced me most; books followed and helped. About the year 1901 rain (or Providence) drove me into the newsroom of a Public Library (town of Reading), where I picked up the Literary Guide, a publication I had never before heard of. I was surprised and shocked to learn that the truths of Christianity were not regarded as truths by men of distinction. Here were articles by writers of scholarship and ability, written in a reasonable vein and breathing high ideals and humanism, yet treating religion as superstition. Strange! I thank all those writers, past and present, for bringing me to the light and enriching my life over many years.

Books which assisted me were: The Age of Reason (Thomas Paine), The Riddle of the Universe (Ernst Haeckel), The New Morality (C. T . Gorham), The A B C of Evolution (Joseph McCabe), The Task of Rationalism (Joseph McCabe), Education (Herbert Spencer), First Principles (Herbert Spencer), and The Existence of God (Joseph McCabe). Also I found the study of astronomy of great assistance in creating a true perspective.

[The writer of the foregoing contribution is nearly blind, and he has written it with remarkable clearness. He accompanies it with an expression of gratitude for the “interest and enjoyment“ has derived from the Literary Guide during the past forty years.

Looking back to my first reading of Rationalist books, I pause and think how fortunate I was during my early upbringing in being left free to choose my own philosophy of life and conduct.

I recall that Joseph McCabe in the long ago came out to Australia on a lecturing tour, when I heard him lecture on “Evolution” and “Life on Other Worlds.” As a consequence his books were eagerly read by me. Robert Macmillan, author of The Great Secret and The Origin of the World, was a friend of my parents, and perchance to him is due the placing of stepping-stones on my way in my early ’teens, and that there was no cargo of precious illusions to throw overboard as the horizon of thought widened. The Literary Guide and the Rationalist Annual, with their many inspiring articles, always appealed to me. Perhaps the books that really did influence me most were Ingersoll’s Lectures and Essays (especially his essays “The Liberty of Man, Woman, and Child,” “The Ghosts,” “The Mistakes of Moses,” and the fine poem which embodies so much—“The Declaration of the Free”), Winwood Reade’s Martyrdom of Man, Samuel Laing’s Modern Science and Modern Thought, followed after by A. Gowans Whyte’s Religion of the Open Mind and Sir George Greenwood’s The Faith of an Agnostic. Later came the works of Darwin, Haeckel, Spencer, and Huxley, and afterwards selections from Voltaire. Shelley’s and James Thomson’s poems played their part too. Now the wisdom of such writers, shedding their light around me, continue to make the Rationalist outlook the one most worth while, and

In my young days I attended a variety of schools, secular and religious, but it was at an old Foundation School in London, when I was about thirteen years of age, that the first beginnings of reason agitated my mind. We had a young and inexperienced curate whose job it was to teach us the meaning of the Scriptures, and he always invited us to ask questions on difficult points or phrases. He certainly got his questions; but his pitiful evasions, his inability to answer plainly the most simple and natural queries, so appalled me that I asked the headmaster whether I could be excused these lessons. To the credit of all concerned my request was granted, and I studied geography instead of the dubious theology.

Leaving school and lodging alone in London, I came across Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, which first impressed me with the idea that the Creation story was nothing more than a story; then another great doubt was removed when The Death of Death (the author’s name I forget) furnished an alternative to that terror of youth, eternal damnation. Robert Blatchford’s Not Guilty was a further help in getting rid of these gruesome ideas, and The Origin of Species finally came like a lamp in darkness, explaining and resolving such doubts and difficulties as still remained.

Curious as it may appear, it was through love of poetry that my first serious doubts concerning religion developed. Entranced with Shelley’s poems, I possessed myself of his complete works, and I can still recall my enthusiasm over some of the phrases.

A short period of Pantheism followed, until I read Schopenhauer’s Religion: A Dialogue. The next book which influenced me considerably was Nordau’s Conventional Lies of Our Civilisation. I still think the chapter on religion a tour de force, and I recall that the subsequent chapters stimulated me to analyse other beliefs which I had been taught to accept unquestioningly.

My first contact with R. P. A. publications was Haeckels Riddle of the Universe. By this time I had completed my pre-medical biological training, and my final development bore out the author’s observation on the great prevalence of Atheists among doctors.

“To accommodate separately two of all known animals (birds, reptiles, etc.) and provision the ship with food and water for them; also to provide accommodation for Noah, relatives, and staff, and food and water for them as well, would need a vessel much larger than any on the Manx service. Can you explain to me where Noah, in days when shipbuilding of such capacity and yards in which to build them were unknown, got his engineering knowledge from or his ship from?” The foregoing is the substance of a question I heard being put to a Yorkshire clergyman some thirty years ago.

My transformation struck root from that period. I was in my mid ’teens. Though I continued as a choirman and churchgoer for many years after, that first blow for logic and the doubts of the “truths” of Bible yarns it commenced never left me. In fact, doubts steadily developed in an ever-widening circle. Subsequently I read Montaigne’s Essais, Darwin’s The Origin of Species, and Huxley’s Man’s Place in Nature. Some twelve or thirteen years ago I saw’ Haeckel’s Riddle of the Universe in a Bedford bookshop window, and my wife, knowing my interest in heterodox literature, promptly bought it. Sir Leslie Stephen’s An Agnostic’s Apology, another splendid issue in the Thinker’s Library, followed. By this time I had moved from the position of a doubting Christian to that of an Agnostic. Soon I joined the R. P. A.

I had then decided that gods vary from race to race and are creations of the human mind. There is no evidence of their existence outside the mind; nor is there any satisfactory evidence of the existence of an author of the universe—the evidence against such a belief is quite as good as, if not better than, the evidence for it.

The books which had the greatest influence on my critical judgment were the Old and New Testaments. To anyone of an observant mind it is difficult to believe the many inadequate and imaginative stories which are to be met with in the Bible, and I was fortunate in meeting friends who introduced me to the works of many eminent Freethought writers, including J. M. Robertson, Bradlaugh, Darwin, Huxley, Thomas Paine, Haeckel, Renan, Joseph McCabe, Bernard Shaw, Anatole France, and others. J. M. Robertson’s History of Freethought I found extremely helpful in my difficulties, because it enabled me to read the Bible from an historical point of view. There were other books, of course, which attracted me—such as Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the History of Creation and Dean Milman’s History of the Jews, but it was Robertson’s book which really solved my problems.

It was not until after the “crisis” of September, 1938, that I first came across heterodox literature. It was in H. G. Wells’s Outline of History that I first saw religion represented, not as a means to progress, but as a cause of regression. Next The Science of Life started me towards Rationalism on the scientific side, and the chance discovery on a railway bookstall of T. H. Huxley’s Lectures and Essays and J. B. S. Haldane’s Fact and Faith completed my conversion. Subsequently I secured other volumes in the Thinker’s Library, notably Herbert Spencer’s Education, H. G. Wells’s First and Last Things, and Aldous Huxley’s Do What you Will. Finally I reflected that if such fine works represented the type of propaganda spread by Rationalists I could no longer remain one only unofficially, so I joined the R. P. A.

Perhaps it is but elementary justice to record that the book primarily responsible for my Rationalist outlook on life was that curious mixture of phantasy and legend, the Bible itself. The fact that I was left an invalid as the result of the international conflict of 1913-1918 meant that I was driven to reading as the only possible outlet for mental energy. Chapter by chapter I read the Bible, and I found doubts increase, until long hours of sleepless thought put the final touch on the complete rejection of the Bible as having any claim to genuine inspiration. The questioning of visiting friends soon brought me news of the Literary Guide, and I made haste to assure that a copy was purchased for me every month. From the Bible to the Literary Guide was for me but a step—one from darkness into light.

Two books stand out like lamps in the darkness—Omar Khayyam’s Rubaiyat and Robert Blatchford’s God and My Neighbour. They came as real revelations to me, as I had never before seen anything like either of them. Curiously enough, it was through the ministrations of a Unitarian parson that I first came across Omar. It is, indeed, ironical that a minister should have sown the seeds of Rationalism in a member of his congregation; but my mind was receptive, and a reading of God and My Neighbour soon sealed my fate.