Page:A biographical dictionary of modern rationalists.djvu/14

PREFACE higher world of science, art, history, philosophy, sociology, and culture generally. It is hardly too much to say that a corresponding list of men and women of the same class who, in the same two generations, made or make a profession of explicit belief in Christian doctrines would not fill a quarter of this volume. It is hardly necessary to observe that a man or woman whose name is not included in this list must not therefore be regarded as a Christian. The compiler has made no effort whatever to invite professions of Rationalist belief. He has simply surveyed, as far as one man may do so, a vast biographical and philosophical literature, and culled such expressions of opinion as have been voluntarily given to the world or recorded by biographers. In numbers of cases he has omitted names from lack of positive evidence. In the great majority of cases of men of distinction in recent times there has been no expression of opinion at all. It is enough that, although the Churches have repeatedly sought to elicit expressions favourable to themselves, they have failed signally to compile an impressive list of adherents.

In fine, the compiler has had to confront the difficulty that the Christian and Rationalist worlds, which were once so sharply divided, have enlarged and softened their boundaries until classification seems in some cases to be difficult. Theologians who reject the idea of miracle and revelation, and even the divinity of Christ, as so many eminent theologians do to-day, do not substantially differ from many of the Deists. Rationalists who maintain that the existence of some Power which they may call God survives all rational criticism, and who highly appreciate the moral teaching of Christ and the action of the Christian religion, are freely invited, or even entreated, to describe themselves as Christians. What has happened in our time is, not that some legendary wave of Materialism has subsided, but that the Churches have lowered their qualifications, so as to embrace the less advanced types of Rationalists. In this connection it is only necessary to say that I have not wittingly included the name of any man who professes to belong to some branch of the Christian Church. Indeed, of those living or recent men and women of distinction who make up the great body of the work, scarcely any accept the idea of personal immortality, which I take to be a definite crucial test. But it would have been ridiculous and ungrateful to exclude a few who, like Alfred Russel Wallace and Lombroso (devoted supporters of the general aims of the Rationalist Press Association until their deaths), strongly maintained the supremacy of reason and dissented from the Churches.

This difficulty, however, is restricted to a smaller number of names than one would be disposed to expect, and in the case of these few men I may cite as examples Tennyson, Ruskin, and Lord Coleridge it cannot fail to be of interest to the reader to know what, in their own words, their mature views on religion really were. The classification is a matter of secondary interest. x