Stanton Coit

Stanton George Coit (11 August 1857 – 15 February 1944) was an American-born leader of the Ethical movement in England. He became a British citizen in 1903.

He was born in Columbus, Ohio; studied at Amherst, at Columbia, and at the Humboldt University of Berlin, where he took the degree of Ph.D.. In 1886 he founded the Neighborhood Guild, a settlement house in New York City's Lower East Side which is now known as the University Settlement House. Coit was also an aide of Felix Adler in the Society for Ethical Culture.

In 1888, he went to London as minister of the South Place Ethical Society (SPES). He married and settled there, later taking British citizenship. He founded and became president of the West London Ethical Society, began a journal, The Ethical World, and preached in the Queen's Road (Bayswater) Ethical Church. Coit's view was that "Ethical Churches" should replace existing churches founded on the basis of religious belief, and that the Church of England could be turned into such a church.

He was editor of the International Journal of Ethics in 1893-1905, and compiled The Message of Man: A Book of Ethical Scriptures (1902), an Ethical Hymn Book (1905), Responsive Services (1911), and Social Worship (1913), and wrote translations of Georg von Gizycki's works on ethics. In 1906 and 1910, he stood for parliament as the Independent Labour Party candidate in Wakefield. He retired as leader of the Ethical Movement in 1935 to be succeeded by Harold Blackham, and later lived near Eastbourne, Sussex.

Publications

• Die ethische Bewegung in der Religion (1890)
• National Idealism and a State Church (1907)
• National Idealism and the Book of Common Prayer (1908)
• Woman in Church and State (1910)
• The Soul of America (1913)

External links

• Works by Stanton Coit at Project Gutenberg

This article incorporates text from an edition of the New International Encyclopedia that is in the public domain.