Moncure Conway
From Philosopedia
Conway, Moncure Daniel (17 March 1832 - 5 November 1907)
An Anglo-American social reformer, Conway was once a Methodist minister but changed his convictions through the influence of Emerson and Hicksite Quakers. He graduated from Harvard Divinity School in 1854 as a Unitarian minister. For a time, he called himself a Unitarian, but by 1862 when his liberality had alienated his congregations, he dropped Unitarianism. Conway disbelieved in Christ’s divinity, debunked biblical miracles, and spoke of Eastern religions as being just as valid and valuable as Christianity. At the start of the Civil War, Conway helped about 30 of his father's slaves escape to freedom.
He is best known for his ministry of London’s South Place Ethical Society. It had originated as a universalist Baptist congregation in the late eighteenth century and had become a Unitarian chapel by the time of the ministry of W. J. Fox. Conway moved his group in the direction of religious humanism and gave it links with the American Ethical Culture movement.
D’Entremont notes that Conway had a heterodox freethought approach which still is a tradition at South Place Chapel. In 1860, he commenced editing the monthly Dial from Cincinnati, Ohio. His Earthward Pilgrimage (1870) was the artistic record of a gifted preacher’s progress from Wesleyan Methodism, through Unitarianism, to a theism which was soon to pass into agnosticism and rationalism.
In 1876 he wrote Human Sacrifice in England and, in 1894, Centenary History of the South Place Society.
His 1892 Life of Paine was the first major positive biography about the revolutionary. He also edited a four-volume edition of Paine's works and wrote several other books, such as a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Demonology and Devil Lore (1879). Conway, who had returned to America when his wife was dying, became an expatriate in Paris following his disgust with the U.S. war against Spain. (Theodore Roosevelt had even invited arch-critic Conway to join the Spanish.)
Conway’s autobiography in 1904 is valuable for its sketch of leading nineteenth-century figures.
After his wife’s death, Conway spoke at length in the United States on topics such as the Spanish-American War, free religion, and voting rights. He became increasingly disillusioned with politics in his home country and left again in 1898, this time to France. There, he devoted much of the rest of his life to the peace movement and writing. He died alone in his Paris apartment.
“To the last,” wrote J. M. Robertson, “I never found him despairing, never even apathetic.”
(See “Freethought Congregations: South Place and Others” in The London Heretics by Warren Sylvester Smith. For a criticism of Moncure’s work on Thomas Paine, see the entry for John Keane. Also see entry for Katherine Conway Nicholson; Conway was her great uncle.)
{BDF; CE; EU, John D’Entremont; FFRF; FO; FUK; FUS; HNS2; JM; JMR; JMRH; RAT; RE; RSR; TRI; WSS}
