RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION.

Auckland Star, Volume LXI, Issue 64, 17 March 1930, Page 3

RATIONALIST ASSOCIATION.

PROGRESS OF FREE THOUGHT.

Under the auspices of the Isew Zealand Association for the Advancement of Rationalism, an entertainment was provided in the Majestic Theatre on Sunday evening. A beautiful scenic film, "Solitude," preceded a brief address given by Mr. E. J. B. Allen, on "Freethouglit and Social Progress." The speaker traced the movement of free inquiry on the part of the Encyclopaedists who preceded the great French Revolution. He said that then men like Robert Owen, who was so prominent in Great Braitain in matters of social progress, started as a freethinker, whilst the founders of the modern Socialist movement were freethinkers to a man. Marx and Engels developed what was known as the materialistic conception oi: history, a method of approach to problems of the past that was used by Prof. Thorold Rogers in his work, "Six Centuries of Work and Wages." De Gibbons' "Industrial History of England" followed along similar lines. Apart from scientists and writers who were "Godless" in their methods, the actual fighters for social progress were irreligious.- Thus the bulk of the workers who took part in the insurrection of the Paris Commune were Freethinkers. All the leaders of the Russian Revolution were free thinkers, and the whole policy was being conducted along materialist lines. As men studied man and the. things that closely concerned man, thoughts of the supernatural receded further and further into the background. The address was followed by an admirable screening, to appropriate music, of that remarkably fine film, "Seventh Heaven," in which Janet Gaynor is seen at her best.