Obituary of Joseph McCabe from The Times.

Joseph McCabe, a pillar of Rationalism as a way of thought and a movement in Britain, died on January 10, 1955 at his home in London at the age of 87. In his early days Joseph McCabe was a Franciscan monk; but in 1896 he renounced his faith and thereafter became a tireless propagandist of Rationalism. In a long and busy life as writer and lecturer he produced a large assortment of books-biographies, historical studies, semi-philosophical and semi-scientific volumes-in which he directed a steady fire of criticism against revealed religion in general and the Roman Catholic Church in particular. A reviewer described him many years ago as "one of our few surviving Victorians", and of necessity this distinction grew more marked with the passage of time. McCabe was indeed a lonely survivor of the serious, militant but somewhat elementary scepticism which perturbed the closing decades of the nineteenth century.

Joseph McCabe, who was of Irish ancestry, was born on November 11, 1867, In 1883, at the unusually early age of 16, he entered the Franciscan order and was trained at St. Francis College, Manchester, at St. Antony's, Forest Gate, and at Louvain University. Ordained a priest in 1890, he was forthwith appointed a professor of scholastic philosophy, and in 1895 became Rector of Buckingham College. In the following year McCabe left the Roman Catholic Church. The reasons which persuaded him to this course are set forth in his Twelve Years in a Monastery, a book which he published with the help of Leslie Stephen in 1897.

While still a Roman Catholic he had set himself to study various aspects of contemporary science, and after he left the Church he became a successful lecturer on evolution and kindred subjects. His Evolution of Mind, which appeared in 1910, contained what was probably his best work in this sphere. A student of German, he translated, among other works of its kind, Haeckel's Riddle of the Universe, which in its cheap English edition had a very wide circulation. Other books of his, such as The Decay of the Church of Rome (1909) and A Candid History of the Jesuits (1913) were violently and at times rawly polemical; but McCabe wrote with conscience, and a saving historical sense acted in some degree as a brake upon a temperamental pugnacity.

In the long series of McCabe's works the biographies of Abelard (1901), St. Augustine (1902). Goethe (1912), Bernard Shaw (1914), G. J. Holyoake (1922), and -in particular-Edward Clodd (1932) are worth recalling. Patient in inquiry and analysis and clear and vigorous in expression, at his best he could provide stimulating reading. Of all his writings his Biographical Dictionary of Modern Rationalists (1921), which took him several years to compile, was his most exacting effort. All too plainly, however, it was open to the criticism that his classification was of too general a character to be significant; even at that time, in an intellectual sense, he seemed to have outlived his age. But he was still full of fight. For all its weakness of proportion, The Golden Ages of History (1940) displayed all his old confidence and independence of judgment, while The Testament of Christian Civilization, published in his eightieth year, breathed defiance to the last.
In 1899, three years after he left the Roman Catholic Church, he married Beatrice, daughter of William Lee, a foreman of works at Leicester, by whom he had two sons and two daughters.

In 1899, three years after he had left the Roman Catholic Church, he married Beatrice, daughter of William Lee, a foreman of works at Leicester, by whom he had two sons and two daughters.

January 26, 1955.