[14] Dr. Alfred Russel Wallace, the distinguished naturalist and evolutionist, is another scientist with spiritist convictions, and his concern for supernatural religion led him to step outside his own domain and make that remarkable attack upon current scientific opinions in astronomical matters which met with such unanimous condemnation (see the Fortnightly Review for March and September, 1903).
[15] In the Times, October, 1904.
[16] At Exeter Hall, in March, 1905, Lady Blount developed her “flat-earth” theory, and accused Newton of want of logic.
[17] A book, edited by the Rev. J. E. Hand (George Allen), which gives, perhaps, the best that can be said by able and fair-minded men, writing in the light of the latest knowledge and criticism, in favour of a reconciliation between religion and science. The book contains essays by various authors—Sir O. Lodge, Professors Thomson, Geddes, and Muirhead, the Rev. P. N. Waggett, the Rev. John Kelman, and others.
[18] Dr. W. Barry, in his Ernest Renan, is content to attribute the change mainly to Renan’s study of Kant. But such a theory is inconsistent with Renan’s own statement in his Reminiscences, where he expressly declares that questions of history, not metaphysics, shook his faith.
[19] Author of a vituperative libel on agnostics, called Atheism and Faith.
[20] The psychical aspect of the belief of such persons is discussed in Chap. VI., § 5.
[21] Canon Scott Holland, in a sermon preached in St. Paul’s Cathedral on the first Sunday after Epiphany, 1905. See also Appendix.
[22] The Secretary of the Rationalist Press Association has received several private letters from clergymen expressing their desire to leave the Church if they could find some employment. They usually have large families dependent upon them for support.
[23] I omit all mention of the trading or domestic classes who often depend directly for their support on strict religionists. The way in which “their bread is buttered” is bound to enter considerably into their calculations, and also they have often even less leisure for the study of modern thought than a steady (temperate) working man.