INGLEWOOD FREETHOUGHT ASSOCIATION.

Freethought Review, Volume II, Issue 16, 1 January 1885, Page 8

INGLEWOOD FREETHOUGHT ASSOCIATION.

Mr Thomas Drake, the Secretary of the Inglewood Freethought Association, has favoured us with the followingreport for the past month : Sir, —On Sunday, 30th November, the new rooms of the above Association were formally opened. Advertisements had been inserted in our daily and weekly papers previously requesting all favourable to the Freethought movement to put in an appearance, and the result was highly satisfactory, as the room, which seats between 70 and 80 was duly filled, ever}- seat being occupied before the addresses commenced, and some few were seated outside on a bench near an open window, and others in a little room adjoining the larger one. Our small meeting room, or lecture room, had been newly papered with oak paper and painted, and it was made more attractive also by having been very tastefully decorated by two enthusiastic friends, who had spent half a day in transporting handsome foliage from the bush at the back of the town into it, and very tastefully arranging it around some excellent pictures lent for the occasion. Several vases of gay flowers were also placed on shelves put along each side of the room 6 or 7 feet from the ground, which shelves had been specially put up for pictures and flowers in vases. Mr Drake opened the proceedings by a brief sketch of what an orthodox man had to believe in. A creation of all things in a week, and a tired God resting; a God putting a man and woman in a garden and making a snake to successfully tempt them, and then making a couple of coats for them and turning them them out and cursing them ; an omniscient God making a world and drowning it; being a Jewish God for a while, and then changing and preferring Christianity; a God who ordered untold millions of animals and birds to be slaughtered in order to satisfy him under the Jewish dispensation, and then under the Christian one ordered a part of himself (his son Jesus) to be murdered to satisfy him. A god who had a hell for the vast mass of humanity, where they were to go, generation after generation, —a hell for nineteentwentieths of all who have lived, are alive now, or ever will live ; and a heaven with all sorts of hybrid monsters in it, and full of thunderings and lightnings, for the very select, predestined few, who were to be rewarded not according to any good they ever did in life, but according to the softness of their pates and their powers of belief in 1,000 gaping miracles and wonders. Mr. Leech traced out the benefits of reformers, and said he considered Jesus one of the greatest and noblest Freethinkers who had ever lived, and that all Freethinkers had done good in their time; he considered Luther did, in spite of his bigotry, for he broke down some of the barriers against freedom of thought which had been erected by the priests upon the religion of Jesus. The Freethought movement of the present day was destined to still further break down those barriers, till at length man’s reason should be totally free. Mr. Leech stated that he had been for a very great number of years a staunch and almost unthinking supporter of orthodoxy, but that suddenly he began to reflect more upon the events and occurrences recorded in the Scriptures, and that as he did so his reason seemed to assert its sway, and to show him that the tales the ministers had so long told him would not bear the light of reason, and that, therefore, he had abandoned the superstitions so long preached to him, and adopted reason as his guide for the future. Mr. H. Peters, the Chairman of our Road Board, next followed, and the happy knack he had of putting forward Freethought views and contrasting them with the orthodox ones, caused a considerable amount of that quiet mirth which is allowed in a Freethought room, but never in a church or chapel, where the face has always to be worn of a proper fiddle pattern. Referring to the statement often made from the pulpit, that ‘ ‘ a man might live a Freethinker, but could not die one,” he characterised it as an absurd statement, brought about often by the priests, who so beset a man in his dying hours, that, with his intellect half gone, it was hard to say what the half-dead man was talking about, or what he thought or believed, <md his ramblings were construed into confessions of faith. He (Mr. Peters) said that as a sailor he had been face to face with death, been where he expected it every moment upon two or three occasions, and he never felt that feeling, nor yet fear. All he felt was that he would rather live and do a little good before he died, which he hoped he was doing by now addressing them. But I must conclude, as I am aware this is trespassing rather fully on your space, but a humble wish to aid in the emancipation of the human mind from the errors which have so long set man bitterly against man, must be my excuse.

All the speakers met with full approval from an intelligent, orderly, and respectable audience, the only interruption being from an orthodox advocate of " beer and bible " who was considerably under the influence of the former, and wished to argue in a voice a foot thick, but was very soon ejected.—Yours, &c, Tnos. Drake, Hon. Sec. P.S.—Fifteen now members were enrolled after the addresses, and amongst the audience were seventeen foreigners. Dec. 7.—On this day Mr. H. Peters delivered a lecture entitled " How I became a Freethinker," and Mr. Drake made some remarks upon " The Ngaire Dippers." On Dec. 14th, Mr. Drake delivered a lecture " On Thirty-nine curious articles," and Mr. T. G. Leech gave two short readings. Mr. Haverbier also made some remarks. Considering that population is scattered in this district and our roads bad, the movement may, I think, be pronounced so far, a success. I hear of several who purpose joining us, and I have just received an invitation to attend at the meeting of an Association newly formed at Waitara.