MOMEEIE
MONGE
at the age of seventeen he went to South
Africa and became an assistant in the Cape
Town Public Library. In 1837 he entered
business, first at Cape Town and then up
country, and he prospered so well that in
1852 he founded the banking business of
Alport and Co. He was elected to the
Legislative Assembly in 1854, and he won
- such a commanding position that he was
selected as first Premier of Cape Colony (1872-78). He was Colonial Secretary in 1881-82, and he then retired from public life and was created K.C.M.G. Molteno had been brought up a Catholic, but he early abandoned the creed. His son, Mr. P. A. Molteno, says in his bio graphy (The Life and Times of Sir J. C. Molteno, 2 vols., 1900 ; ii, 465) : " Mr. Molteno s life was in the highest sense deeply religious, but the prevailing forms of religion repelled him. His religion was above the narrow formularies of any sect. He often quoted Pope s lines :
For modes of faith let graceless zealots fight ; His can t be wrong whose life is in the right. "
D. Sep. 1, 1886.
MOMERIE, Professor Alfred Williams,
M.A., D.Sc., theologian. B. Mar. 22, 1848. Ed. City of London School, Edin burgh, and Cambridge (St. John s). After a brilliant career at Cambridge, Momerie joined the ministry of the Church of England (1879), and he served as curate at Leigh. In 1880 he was appointed pro fessor of logic and mental philosophy at King s College, and in 1883 preacher to the Foundling Hospital. His successive books (The Defects of Modern Christianity, 1882 ; Agnosticism, 1884, etc.) raised increasing murmurs of heresy, and a lecture he delivered in 1891 deprived him of both his positions. In this (The Fate .of Religion, published 1893) he said that " the orthodoxy common to all the Churches is a monstrous outgrowth of ecclesiasticism." He retained his clerical title, but was a pure Theist, preaching as such in Portman Booms. D. Dec. 6, 1900.
517
M M M S E N , Professor Theodor,
German historian. B. Nov. 30, 1817. Ed. Altona Gymnasium and Kiel University. From 1844 to 1847 Mommsen studied archaeology in France and Italy on an annuity provided by the Berlin Academy. In 1848 he was appointed professor of law at Leipzig, but he was deposed for taking part in the Eevolution. In 1852 he became professor of Roman law at Zurich, in 1854 at Breslau ; and in 1858 he was chosen professor of ancient history at Berlin. He entered the Prussian Parlia ment in 1873 as a Liberal, and in the same year he was appointed Perpetual Secretary of the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Mommsen, editor of the Corpus Inscrip- tionum Latinarum and the Monumenta Germanic Historica, and author of Ro m- ische Geschichte (5 vols., 1854-85) and other classical works on ancient Eome, was the highest authority on the pre- Imperial period, and one of the first scholars of Europe in the nineteenth century. He obtained the Nobel Prize in 1902. L. M. Hartmann, his biographer (Theodor Mommsen, 1908), tells us that at college he " left Christianity for Deism, then Deism for Atheism " (p. 64). In later years he returned to a vague Theism, but he hated " Kaplanokratie " (the rule of priests) all his life, and described himself as " homo minime ecclesiasticus " (p. 81). He left his great History of Borne un finished, partly, Hartmann says probably mainly because " he found no pleasure in describing the substitution of the Nazarene for the ancient spirit " (p. 81). D. Nov. 1, 1903.
MONBODDO, Lord. See BURNETT, JAMES.
MONGE, Gaspard, Count de Peluse,
French physicist. B. May 10, 1746. Ed. Beaume College. Monge was so precocious that the Oratorian priests of Lyons set him to teach physics and mathematics in their college at the age of sixteen, and tried to induce him to enter their Society. His 518
