“A duty of free enquiry”
The charismatic William Johnson Fox, Minister of Parliament Court Chapel and South Place Chapel (forerunners of Conway Hall Ethical Society) addressed his radical congregation on 27 March 1842.
Religion
Seasons Greetings from the British Humanist Association Archive, 1966
Seasons Greetings from the British Humanist Association Archive, 1966.
Hidden note under South Place?
In 1876 A.J. Waterlow discovered a scrap of paper in the hand of William Johnson Fox, Minister of South Place Chapel (later South Place Ethical Society).
The building of South Place Chapel, 1821
In 1821 the congregation of William Johnson Fox were in the process of commissioning the Unitarian Chapel at South Place, Finsbury, which would later become the home of South Place Ethical Society.
The records of the Ethical Union and British Humanist Association
As well as the records of the Ethical Union and British Humanist Association, the archive (held by Bishopsgate Institute) also contains material of affiliated humanist groups.
The Ethical Church, Queensway, Bayswater
The Ethical Church, Queensway, Bayswater, was established in the late 1890s by Dr Stanton Coit, founder of the West London Ethical Society and a prominent figure in the Ethical Movement. Coit hoped that his Church would be the first of many ‘ethical churches’ and act as encouragement to other established churches (ie. the Church of England), to move away from religious teaching.
Joint Committee
In late 1919, the Union of Ethical Societies appointed representatives of South Place Ethical Society, the Free Religious Movement and the Union to form a Joint Committee to ‘consider and report as to the lines upon which it would be desirable to call a conference of Modern Religious Thinkers’.