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Clergy (followed by quite a series of Free Gifts), and announced that he was found ing a new religious body. He did not pose as a Deist, but, intervening in the controversy with Anthony Collins [SEE], published A Moderator Between an Infidel find an Apostate (1725). As he denied or explained away the resurrection and the virgin-birth, to say nothing of lesser miracles, the Government, not seeing how he differed from the "Infidel," indicted him for blasphemy, but did not actually prosecute. In a further series of pamphlets he turned all the miracles of Christ into allegories, and he had a warm struggle with what he called " the hireling clergy." He was prosecuted for blasphemy (1729), and was sentenced to a year in prison and a fine of one hundred pounds. As he was unable to pay, he lingered in a debtors jail until he died. Woolston is a good example of the difficulty of classifying early critics of orthodoxy. The Encyclo pedia Britannica describes him as " English Deist," and the Dictionary of National Biography as " enthusiast and freethinker "; yet Woolston recoiled from Unitarianism, and was far more Christian than other writers who are counted orthodox. He contended that he had the authority of the Fathers for allegorizing the miracles. While deploring Woolston s "blasphemies," Chalmers admits that, though a poor man, he paid the fines incurred by his publishers. D. Jan. 27, 1733.
WRIGHT, Chauncey, American mathe matician. B. Sep. 20, 1830. Ed. Harvard University. He was appointed computer to the American Ephemeris and Nautical Almanac, which had just been started at Cambridge. His mathematical papers gave proof of high ability, and from 1863 to 1870 he was corresponding secretary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. In mid-life he turned more to philosophical questions, and in 1870 he delivered a course of lectures on psychology. Between 1865 and 1875 he was one of the most forcible writers in the American magazines 905
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in support of Evolution. Americans regarded him rather as the mouthpiece of the English school ; but he was an original and acute thinker, and often criticized Spencer and Lewes (see his Philosophical Discussions, 1877, with Memoir by C. E. Norton). In 1874-75 he was instructor in mathematical science at Harvard. D. Sep. 12, 1875.
WRIGHT, Elizur, American reformer. B. Feb. 12, 1804. Ed. Yale University. Wright took up the Abolitionist cause, and was secretary of the Anti- Slavery Society. He edited the Abolitionist and the Common wealth, and was President of the National Liberal League. Ingersoll, who delivered his funeral oration, describes him as " one of the Titans who attacked the monsters, the gods, of his time." He was an Atheist, and contributed to the Boston Investigator and the Freethinker s Magazine. D. Dec. 21, 1885.
WRIGHT, Frances. See D AnusMONT, FRANCES.
WRIGHT, Michael, Owenite. B. Oct. 18, 1818. He settled early in life in Man chester, and there he came into touch with George Jacob Holyoake and accepted the social teaching and Rationalism of Robert Owen. For a time he lived on one of the Owenite farm colonies in Cambridgeshire. In 1857 he settled at Leicester. Wright and Josiah Gimson [SEE] and a few others founded the Leicester Secular Society, one of the best embodiments of Holyoake s Secularism, and afterwards built the Leicester Secular Hall, almost the only surviving institution of the zealous early days of Secularism. It was opened in 1881, a few months before Wright s death. He left a sum of 50 a year for five years to the Secular Society, of which he had been a Director. D. Sep., 1881.
WRITER, Clement, writer. B. end of
the sixteenth century. Writer was a
master tailor of London, whose early years
are known only from his lawsuits between
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