The National Secular Society and the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK), and associated organisations and individuals, have had a mixed relationship over the last century and a quarter. Some people have been members or supporters of both; others have taken sides. The Freethinker and the New Humanist are both independent publications, but historically, the former tended to be more closely associated with the NSS, the latter with the BHA. This was so even though the Freethinker usually described itself as a ‘secular humanist’ publication – or, under David Collis’ nine-month editorship, a paper of ‘freethought and humanism’.

The image of the week is of the first editorial by Collis when he was the incoming editor of the Freethinker, published on 20th January 1967. Collis first congratulates the NSS, somewhat reservedly, on its first hundred years (it was founded in 1866). He then makes the point that many members of the British Humanist Association, which had been formed from the Ethical Union (formerly the Union of Ethical Societies) and the Rationalist Press Association in 1963, were also members of the NSS and the RPA. Collis also clearly considered himself a humanist. However, as he acidly points out, the RPA had subsequently withdrawn ‘from this companionate marriage’ with the BHA.

One of the gripes which certain secularists and freethinkers had long had with the ethical organisations and their humanist successors was to do with that ancient British bugbear, class. Although the BHA had shown much promise, it had quickly become, in Collis’ view, ‘heavily loaded with well-educated middle-class people … narcissistically Intellectual Humanists … disinclined to fraternise with working-class people.’

Whether this says more about the BHA or Collis is another matter. However, it would probably be fair to say that, in the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century, despite their overlap, the NSS and the Freethinker tended to address a working-class audience, while the ethical and humanist organisations and those associated with them tended to be more ‘establishment’, or at least respectable.

To the outsider, this historic rivalry might seem reminiscent of the conflict between the People’s Front of Judaea and the Judaean People’s Front. We make no comment about the relationship between the organisations or their political inclinations today – except to note that while there may be strength in numbers, there is also virtue in differences of opinion.

In closing, Collis emphasised the editorial independence of the Freethinker, even from the National Secular Society. As he put it, ‘I shall gladly consider articles on Freethought and Humanism from anyone, Roman Catholic Cardinals and Fundamentalist Hot-Gospellers included.’

We second this approach. Cardinals and Hot-Gospellers, humanists and secularists, progressives, conservatives and even liberal centrists, are all free to apply. We ask merely that they all abide by the same standard of clear argumentation on the basis of reason, logic and evidence.

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In 1986, the literary scholar Ian MacKillop published The British Ethical Societies, a history of the organisations that were founded in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in the course of the Ethical Movement, with a view to exploring how to live morally without religion.

The below review was published in the September-October 1986 issue of Humanist News, at the time the newsletter of the British Humanist Association (now Humanists UK). Stanton Coit, mentioned in the review, became minister of South Place Religious Society (now Conway Hall) on condition that it became an Ethical Society instead. The Ethical Movement also led to the formation of the Union of Ethical Societies, the ancestor of HUK, in 1896.

The Freethinker was intrigued to see the sort of people who, according to the unidentified reviewer, were attracted to the ethical societies back in their zealous, ‘militantly anti-individualistic’ early days.

In the reviewer’s words: ‘Ethics in its day, like ecology more recently, has a fashionable ring. It was a trend term for progressives, those people with an agonisingly efficient concience [sic] drawn in from the fringes of Positivism, Unitarianism, Socialism…The ethical societies were heroically tolerant of all shades of opinion, so long as it was contrary.’

We are grateful to Bob Forder for submitting this image. Full text is copied out below.

Possessed by Not-Quite-Holy Spirit

Transcript as written.

This small and learned book, somewhat unpromising in title, turns out to be that rarest thing: an academic study that in its concentration on a new specific subject revives quite magically the whole feeling of a period. In tackling the ethicists, the network of societies dedicated to irreligious religion, the book of Hymns and Anthems with Hymns of Modern Thought, Dr. MacKillop has rekindled a good deal of the old ardour, the rationalist fervour, of the Time of the New Life, which was at it’s most exciting from 1890–1910 or so.

Ethics in its day, like ecology more recently, has a fashionable ring. It was a trend term for progressives, those people with an agonizingly efficient concience drawn in from the fringes of Positivism, Unitarianism, Socialism, Ramsey Macdonald was an anethicist for instance, though perhaps not a typical example. But who was typical? For the great characteristic of the movement was its vagueness. Ethicists were deliberately disunited, and the 46 (non affiliated) branches which the movement had acquired by 1906, mainly around London, varied hugely in their character. Ethicists in Bloomsbury were very English – intellectual; ethicists in Bayswater were more outgoing and more American. The ethical societies were heroically tolerant of all shades of opinion, so long as it was contrary.

The ethicists evolved a form of public meeting which was almost but not quite like a church service, conducted by someone whose general resemblance to a clergyman was tempered by the fact that his accent was less likely to gentlemanly-clerical than Scottish-regional or tinged with transatlantic. Being militantly anti-individualistic, some groups did away with leaders altogether, appointing panels as “lecturers” instead.

The most flamboyant figure in Dr MacKillop’s marvellous collection of men possessed by Not-Quite-The Holy-Spirit is Stanton Coit, the virtual father of the movement, a red-headed Emerson enthusiast from the Mid West, who having been dismissed by the South Place ethicists for overvehemence, founded his own Ethical Church in West London, a building resplendent with a large Walter Crane mural.

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