Ethical Addresses and Ethical Record - Sixteenth Series

 

Alfred R. Wolff was an early proponent of wind energy

The Sixteenth Series of Ethical Addresses and Ethical Record was published in 1909.  It is marked by the republication of a couple of important addresses, a memorial service, summaries more and less brief of national and international meetings, statements from four major Societies about their aims and ideals (St. Louis, Chicago, Brooklyn, and Philadelphia), as well as a number recent platforms presented at various Ethical Culture Societies in the 1908-1909 season.

The image above is a tribute to Alfred R. Wolff, heating and cooling engineer, who was an advocate of wind energy (The Windmill as Prime Mover) and a friend of Ethical Culture.  His death in 1909 was commemorated with Memorial Addresses from Percival Chubb and John Lovejoy Elliott, both published in this volume along (pp. 178 - 187) with a telegraphed message from Felix Adler, then out of the country.

Anna Garlin Spencer provides a fulsome description of the first Summer School of Ethics, held in June and July, 1908, at and in conjunction with the University of Wisconsin in Madison (pp. 52 - 60).  Her description is supplemented with a complete program listing (pp. 255 -259).  There are online references to another Summer School held in 1910, but more searching is needed to see how this program fared over time.  A longer but anonymous report on the first International Congress on Moral Education (held September 25-29, 1909) is also provided (pp. 77-92).  Six such congresses were held in Europe between 1908 and 1934.  

An unsigned statement asserts that "The Right of Political Asylum [is] Threatened" (pp. 113-114) to explain the need to reprint two older platform addresses which referred to the US treaty with Russia (1893).  Felix Adler (pp. 115 - 135) and William M. Salter (pp. 136 - 159) had at that time protested the treaty, indicating that it would eventually place the US in the position of denying sanctuary to individuals fleeing unjust prosecution.  The statement applauds the "prophetic protests" of Adler and Salter, justifying the need to make them available again to contemporary readers.

More contemporary platforms by current and past clergy leaders provide the bulk of the volume:  Adler spoke on gambling and spiritual progress (not in the same lecture), Chubb on faith and then on Easter.  Despite his retirement from Chicago, a second address from Salter, discussed "Ethics in the Light of Darwin's Theory."  A posthumous list of things to believe, authored by Walter L. Sheldon, provides inspiring quotes from his pen.  (I rather like this one:  "Believe in the value of other men's experience and thereby save half your life from being a failure by endeavoring to show that you know more than everybody else." [p. 279])  Leslie Willis Sprague talked about moral inspiration, what an Ethical Society is, and, as part of a series on Social Ideals, the Ethical reorganization thereof.  David Saville Muzzey combined two lectures into one--"The New Paganism and the New Piety" (pp. 189-218)--and presented a paean to Milton as an apostle of Liberty (pp. 93-112).  The latter, a combination of history and poetry--the historian waxing poetic about the poet and his crucial role in the history of democracy--inspires me to set aside my disregard for Puritanism to see the deeper (nonreligious) issues that inspired Milton.

One additional note of interest (to me!) comes from Sprague's pen as he attempts to correct some "misapprehensions" about Ethical Culture (pp. 48 - 51).  His defense covers these mistakes:

1.  "[T]he Ethical Culture movement is merely a development of the Jewish religion";
2.  "Ethical Culture is irreligious, is opposed to the development of the religious life and to the expression of the religious aspirations of mankind";
3. "Ethical Culture is only an emasculation of older religious systems, especially Judasim (sic) and Christianity, the appropriation of their ethical principles without accepting the theological and sacerdotal elements which have accompanied these principles in the past";
4. "Ethical Culture is very readily and very naturally misunderstood by those who are concerned with the letter rather than with the spirit of the moral law"; and
5. "Ethical Culture is another sect."

It's worth a read, I think, even if one disagrees with Sprague.

Finally, this issue provides another change in the publisher.  Same address in Philadelphia, but now formally acknowledged as "American Ethical Union."