Adams, John (1735-1826), Second President of the United States. His rejection of Christianity, which he professed to admire morally, runs all through his letters to Jefferson, of which there is a good selection edited by Welstach (1925), though it is better to read them in the original edition (1856). The correspondence of the two men, the most accomplished who ever rose to high political office in America — they freely quote Greek, Latin, Italian and French to either other — is very free and most interesting. The attempt of his grandson and a few others to represent Adams as a Unitarian is not honest. He was not even a very firm Deist. One letter he wrote to Jefferson (May 12, 1820), who says that its "crowd of skepticisms" kept him awake at night, has been suppressed by the pious Unitarian grandson, but in another (January 17, 1820) he defines god as "an essence that we know nothing of" and says that the attempts of philosophers to get beyond this are "games of push-pin." He calls the Incarnation an "awful blasphemy," and says of the First Cause "whether we call it Fate or Chance or God". He believed in personal immortality but admitted that he knew no proof of it. He was, he says in a letter of May 15, 1817, often "tempted to think that this would be the best of all possible worlds if there was no religion in it." His family fell away to respectable Unitarianism, but his grandson Charles Francis Adams (1835-1915) the distinguished historian, was an Agnostic of the Leslie Stephen school, as is shown in the Life and Letters.

Sir Leslie Stephen

He took orders in the Church of England when he was at Cambridge, but the fit of piety soon passed. He told me that even there he was a member of a sort of secret society of heretics and that his language in the athletic field was robust. In time he reached the front rank of British writers — in his later years he was known as "the Dean of English Letters" — and was regarded as the leading literary critic and a very sound historian, widely respected on both sides of the Atlantic. He was an outspoken agnostic (Free Thinking, An Agnostic's Apology, etc.) and a man of genially austere character. His brother, Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, baronet, a judge, professor of law, and author of weighty works on law, also "entirely abandoned his belief in the orthodox dogmas."

Sarah Bernhardt

Sarah Bernhardt (1845-1923), the greatest French actress of recent times. A. Carel says in his Histoire anecdotique des contemporains, (1885, p. 46) that Gounod once asked her in her studio if she ever prayed. "I," she said, "Never. I'm an atheist." To her disgust Gounod went down on his knees there and then and prayed for her. Gounod, the favorite composer of modern Roman Catholics, was neurotic and inconsistent. He "vacillated between mysticism and voluptuousness," says one of his biographers.

Andrew Carnegie (1837-1919), philanthropist. In the course of his life he gave away $350,000,000, generally for sound social objects such as public free libraries. Dr. Moncure Conway, who knew him, says that he was an Agnostic, and a few references to his religion in his Life of James Watt confirm this. He refers to "the mysterious realm which envelops man" and says in regard to discussion of religion that "we are but young in all this mystery business." The Truthseeker of August 23, 1919, quoted a confession of faith of his in which, a few years before his death, he rejects "all creeds" and says that he was "a disciple of Confucius and Franklin." His confusion of an Atheist and a deist is due to the fact that he shed religion without any serious interest in it and avoided the subject as far as possible.

Theodore Dreiser

His hostility to religion runs through all the grim, realistic novels that have made him famous. In one of them he says: "Assure a man that he has a soul and then frighten him with old wives' tales as to what is to become of him afterwards, and you have hooked a fish, a mental slave."

Henry Havelock Ellis

It is hardly necessary to show that the famous psychologist of sex was a freethinker. The clergy loathed him and I had private knowledge of attempts to trap and prosecute him. His agnostic views are explained in his Affirmations [written in 1897] and My Life [written in 1940].

Sigmund Freud

In his last work, Der Mann Moses and die monotheistische Religion (1939), he showed that, as most folk had assumed, he was a thorough freethinker. In his last few years he was an Honorary Associate (like myself) of the British Rationalist Press Association.

Mathilda Joslyn Gage

One of the many able American women who, in spite of general public hostility, took an active part in the abolitionist and feminist movements of the last century. Mrs. Gage was President of the National Women Suffrage Association, edited their paper, and collaborated with Miss. Anthony in writing the history of the movement. Her freethought is emphatically given in her Women, Church, and State (1893).

As Haeckel outspokenly rejected all religion all his life and wrote the very anti-religious Riddle of the Universe, which sold several million copies in a score of languages, religious writers have been untruthful about his scientific distinction;... His many large scientific works brought him four gold medals and seventy diplomas from scientific bodies all over the world .... When I went to stay with him in Jena, I found that streets and squares of the city had been named after him. The clergy put out a legend that he had "forged" illustrations for his books — he was a good artist — which I completely disproved twenty-six years ago....

A druggist's boy who worked his way up to the position of probably the greatest dramatist of modern times. His biographer Aall shows that he discarded orthodoxy in his later teens but was quietly skeptical until 1871, when he met Georg Brandes. A few years later he wrote The Emperor and The Galilaean to express his new militant mood. He remained agnostic and anti-religious to the end. "Bigger things than the state will fall," he wrote Brandes, "all religion will fall."

Although born and educated in Denmark he lived in so many countries and had so remarkable a knowledge of the literature of each that he was the nearest approach to a [continental]. He was a member also of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the British Royal Society of Literature. His position did not deter him in the least from professing freethought and helping the cause. Both he and his brother Carl were outspoken Agnostics.

Benito Juarez

He was a full-blooded Indian who was admitted to the Mexican bar and became a judge. As governor of Oaxaca, then Minister of Justice, he "oppressed" the clergy — that is to say, curtailed their privileges and checked their corruption — and rendered fine service to the people. He was President 1858-1862 and 1867-1872 and left a great memory behind him. He was an atheist.

[text only]