In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of the Ethical Movement, two important volumes were published: Aspects of Ethical Religion, edited by Horace Bridges, as a collection of essays in honor of Felix Adler, and The Fiftieth Anniversary of the Ethical Movement 1876-1926, with a prefatory note by Henry Golding, as a collection of statements by Alder and contemporary Leaders, with a chronology. These essays and statements throw a flood of light on the understanding of the nature of the Ethical Movement as then conceived. Several were directly addressed to definition of Ethical Culture and should be consulted to fill out the overview offered by this present paper.
Adler's own address on Some Characteristics of the American Ethical Movement, included in the latter book and originally given in London in 1925, points to the desire to find a "consecrating influence" on life as the origin of the Ethical Societies and the giving "birth to personalities who have attained for themselves an abiding ethical faith, and are aflame with it," as the goal. Interestingly, he saw the opposition to the Movement to have come from three sources: The fundamentalists who thought his abandonment of religious dogma as the source of morality monstrous; the relativists who saw morality as a mere convention of humans; and the individualists whose "voluntarism" overemphasized the importance of selfhood to the neglect of the social pole of moral experience.
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