Godwin (William), English historian, political writer and novelist, b. Wisbeach, Cambridgeshire, 3 March, 1756. The son of a Dissenting minister, he was designed for the same calling. He studied at Hoxton College, and came out, as he entered, a Tory and Calvinist; but making the acquaintance of Holcroft, Paine, and the English Jacobins, his views developed from the Unitarianism of Priestley to the rejection of the supernatural. In '93 he published his republican work on Political Justice. In the following year he issued his powerful novel of Caleb Williams. He married Mary Wollstonecraft, '96; wrote, in addition to several novels and educational works, On Population, in answer to Malthus, 1820; a History of the Commonwealth, '24-28; Thoughts on Man, '31; Lives of the Necromancers, '34. Some Freethought essays, which he had intended to form into a book entitled The Genius of Christianity Unveiled, were first published in '73. They comprise papers on such subjects as future retribution, the atonement, miracles, and character of Jesus, and the history and effects of the Christian religion. Died 7 April, 1836. Goethe (Johann Wolfgang von), Germany's greatest poet, b. Frankfort-on-Main, 28 Aug. 1749. He records that early in his seventh year (1 Nov. 1758) the great Lisbon earthquake filled his mind with religious doubt. Before he was nine he could write several languages. Educated at home until sixteen, he then went to Leipsic University. At Strasburg he became acquainted with Herder, who directed his attention to Shakespeare. He took the degree of doctor in 1771, and in the same year composed his drama "Goetz von Berlichingen." He went to Wetzlar, where he wrote Sorrows of Werther, 1774, which at once made him famous. He was invited to the court of the Duke of Saxe-Weimar and loaded with honors, becoming the centre of a galaxy of distinguished men. Here he brought out the works of Schiller and his own dramas, of which Faust is the greatest. His chief prose work is Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship. His works are voluminous. He declared himself "decidedly non-Christian," and said his objects of hate were "the cross and bugs." He was averse to abstractions and refused to recognise a Deity distinct from the world. In philosophy he followed Spinoza, and he disliked and discountenanced the popular creed. Writing to Lavater in 1772 he said: "You look upon the gospel as it stands as the divinest truth: but even a voice from heaven would not convince me that water burns and fire quenches, that a woman conceives without a man, and that a dead man can rise again. To you, nothing is more beautiful than the Gospel; to me, a thousand written pages of ancient and modern inspired men are equally beautiful." Goethe was opposed to asceticism, and Pfleiderer admits "stood in opposition to Christianity not merely on points of theological form, but to a certain extent on points of substance too." Goethe devoted much