may be rated as forms of moderate freethought propaganda, and
are to be found in all Protestant countries, with all shades of
development. A movement of the kind has existed for a number of
years back in America, in the New England States and elsewhere,
and may be held to represent a theistic or agnostic thought too
advanced to adhere even to the Unitarianism which during the two
middle quarters of the century was perhaps the predominant creed
in New England. The Theistic Church conducted by the Rev. Charles
Voysey after his expulsion from the Church of England in 1871 to
his death in 1912, and since then by the Rev. Dr. Walter Walsh, is
an example. Another type of such a gradual and peaceful evolution
is the South Place Institute (formerly "Chapel") of London, where,
under the famous orator W. J. Fox, nominally a Unitarian, there was
preached between 1824 and 1852 a theism tending to pantheism, perhaps
traceable to elements in the doctrine of Priestley, and passed on by
Mr. Fox to Robert Browning. [1745] In 1864 the charge passed to Moncure
D. Conway, under whom the congregation quietly advanced during twenty
years from Unitarianism to a non-scriptural rationalism, embracing
the shades of philosophic theism, agnosticism, and anti-theism. In
Conway's Lessons for the Day will be found a series of peculiarly vivid
mementos of that period, a kind of itinerary, more intimate than any
retrospective record. The latter part of his life, partly preserved
in one of the most interesting autobiographies of the century, was
spent between England and the United States and in travel. After
his first withdrawal to the States in 1884 the Institute became an
open platform for rationalist and non-theological ethics and social
and historical teaching, and it now stands as an "Ethical Society" in
touch with the numerous groups so named which have come into existence
in England in the last dozen years on lines originally laid down by
Dr. Felix Adler in New York. At the time of the present writing the
English societies of this kind number between twenty and thirty, the
majority being in London and its environs. Their open adherents, who
are some thousands strong, are in most cases non-theistic rationalists,
and include many former members of the Secularist movement, of which
the organization has latterly dwindled. On partly similar lines there
were developed in provincial towns about the end of the century
a small number of "Labour Churches," in which the tendency was to
substitute a rationalist humanitarian ethic for supernaturalism;
and the same lecturers frequently spoke from their platforms and
from those of Ethical and Secularist societies. Of late, however,
the Labour Churches have tended to disappear. All this means no
resumption of church-going, but, by the confession of the Churches,
a completer secularization of the Sunday.