The Trouble With Tom: The Strange Afterlife and Times of Thomas Paine. Paul Collins. 275pp. Paperback. Bloomsbury, 2006. ISBN 0 7475 7768 4. £12.99. 

This is a book that truly lives up to its title, a labyrinthine journey the author takes to trace the bones of Thomas Paine. After his burial in America, they were dug up by William Cobbett who brought them back to England with him, and initially lodged them in a hotel in Liverpool. Thereafter, they changed hands a number of times until they disappeared altogether. 

The author starts his search in New York, initially tracking down the house that Thomas Paine died in and visiting various other sites associated with his last days, before his burial at his farm in New Rochelle. 

He then journeys to England, visiting any places or sites where the bones may have been taken. He also writes about all those associated with Thomas Paine and all who wrote about him and published his works, particularly his biographer Moncure Conway, after whom Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, London, is named.

One of the difficulties of the book is the immediate detail the author describes in following up his trail. The children playing in the streets he visited, the coffee he drank in cafés, nothing is spared in the minutest detail. 

However, what it does demonstrate is how the influence of Thomas Paine lives on, and interest in his work that has never ceased, and nor will ever.

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These Are The Times, A Life Of Thomas Paine. Trevor Griffiths. Nottingham, Spokesman. xii & 195pp. Paperback. ISBN 0 85124 695 8. £15.00 

In a sense this book, the screenplay written by Trevor Griffith’s for the proposed film in his life of Paine, well almost, as it does not take boyhood, saddens me, since its publication infers, to me at least, that the film may never be made. Sir Richard Attenborough attempts to obtain funding for the film have not met with the success they deserve, which is a great pity, as Paine’s life would make a superb film. We can but hope that the project even now will come to fruition.

Set in Britain, America and France, Griffiths recreates episodes in Paine’s life with a dialogue that incorporates his opinions, and those of others, but moulded into a continuous thread with what may be described as a degree of literary license, but it should be remembered that in a film of Paine’s life the scriptwriter would have no option but to combine some fiction with fact so inevitably some liberties have had to be taken even though they may upset purists, but this film has to entertain as well as inform so this is inevitable. There is humour, too, and the odd crack at Washington’s expense, or expanse. The book is a good read, but I fear the price is rather on the steep side which may put people who might otherwise buy it off doing so. 

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Freethinkers, A History Of American Secularism. Susan Jacoby. New York, Metropolitan Books, 2004. 417pp. Illustrated. Hardback. ISBN 0 8050 7442 2. $27.50 (£17.50). 

Although it may seem something of an exaggeration I nevertheless feel that books devoted to the history of secularism are sadly as rare as hens teeth, so it was something of a surprise when I read a mention in an American publication about the forthcoming publication of the work under review. The author’s name was unfamiliar to me, something which made me wonder just what sort of book she had produced, would it turn out to be a poorly researched work that damned secularists and then went on to describe them as old fashioned and out of date because Christianity had changed so much, which it has not? Or would it be a melodramatic essay based around the activities of a few controversial figures such as Madelyn Murray O’Hair? 

Well, in the event the book turned out to be an extremely well written and very readable work, and, yes, it does mention Madalyn Murray O’Hair, albeit briefly, the author describing her as “almost alone in her willingness to call herself an atheist”, and who earned her place in the religious right’s pantheon of demons for her success in having prayers banned in American schools. However, although individual rooms are large in the pages of the book, by no means all having actually connected with organised secularism as such, the author’s overwhelming concern is with issues, and it is the secular response to these that is the main characteristic of the book. Nevertheless in the process the author, who does not lack a sense of humour, introduces her readers to characters such as Philo D. Beckworth, who built a “grand theatre” or “temple of the performing arts”, in Dowagiac. Beckworth was “a committed freethinker and the town’s main employer, his factory being one of the largest producers of stoves and furnaces in the United States. He had a strong philanthropic streak and not only paid his employees high wages but also gave them sick pay, which, Ms.Jacoby remarks, was in 1890s America almost unheard of. His theatre was, which was adorned with busts of famous freethinkers, including Ingersoll, Paine, Voltaire, Susan B. Anthony, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, George Sand and Walt Whitman, theatre was dedicated by Ingersoll, who, she writes, °seized the once-in-a- lifetime chance to dedicate a building prominently displaying his own graven image — a distinction customarily reserved for the honoured dead”. The theatre was demolished in 1968 and many of the busts were destroyed, however, local freethinkers rescued that of Ingersoll and it can now be seen in the Ingersoll Birthplace Museum in Dresden, New York. Another bit of odd information was that the notorious Roman Catholic bishop Fulton J. Sheen, went to considerable lengths to conceal the fact that he had a Protestant half-sister, and what was more, something he acknowledged with great reluctance, his great uncle Daniel Sheen had been a partner in Robert Ingersoll’s law practice in Peoria, but, claimed Sheen, he never embraced his partners agnosticism. 

American is a country in which state and church are legally separated, but as Ms. Jacoby notes, it is “one of the greatest unresolved paradoxes of American history that religion has come to occupy such an important place in the communal psyche and public life of a nation founder on the separation of church and state”. The early chapters of the book discuss the influence of Thomas Paine, to whom a whole chapter is devoted and attempts to impose religion on the new republic, one such attempt being made by Patrick Henry, who in 1784 introduced a bill into the Virginia General Assembly to assess all citizens for faxes to pay teachers of religion. The bill’s passage appeared to be a foregone conclusion but following a campaign against it led by James Madison, which even gained support from religious groups — one petition against it was signed by four thousand Quakers, it was, the author says, “relegated to the dustbin of history”, and instead the Assembly adopted Jefferson’s proposal for the complete separation of church and state, with some modifications. 

Essentially this book might be described in broad terms as being thematic, in that the author examines in subjects such as woman’s rights, slavery, evolution and anti-evolution, the rights of America’s coloured population, cultural activities, the ‘Unholy Trinity: Atheists, Reds, Darwinists’ (a chapter heading) which introduces readers to among others, the Scopes trial, which has popularly been represented as a defeat for obscurantist fundamentalism, but, as the author points out, this was not quite so, and literary censorship, discussing in detail the efforts to suppress Walt Whitman’s poem Leaves of Grass. In this issue, the author presents the attitudes and work of individual secularists, but also brings to the fore just how much support they received from religious individuals and groups. 

Freethought had little impact on one major group in American society, the coloureds. Ms.Jacoby discusses the reasons for this and in the process introduces us to the Negro secularist W. E. B. Du Bois, not that he appears to have had any formal connection with any freethought group. Brought up a Christian he increasingly came to regard “the church as an institution which defended such evils as slavery, colour caste, exploitation of labour and war”, although this clearly points to his freethought, or if you like, secularism, having been founded on and inspired by political considerations. In 1894 he had created a storm of controversy while employed as a lecturer at Wilberforce College, a college for Negroes run by the Ohio state government and the African Methodist Episcopal Church, when he flatly refused to lead students in public prayer. He was to write as a consequence of having studied in Europe that, ‘Religion helped and hindered my artistic sense. I knew the old English and German hymns by heart. I loved their music but ignored their silly words with studied inattention. Grand music came at last in the religious oratorios which we learned at Fisk University but it burst on me in Berlin with the Ninth Symphony and its Hymn of Joy. I worshiped at the Cathedral and ceremony which I saw in Europe but I knew what I was looking at when in New York a Cardinal became a strike-breaker and the Church of Christ fought the Communism of Christianity. The cardinal in question was Patrick Hayes. In old age Du Bois joined the Communist Party as a protest against McCarthyism. 

Secularists prominent in the fight for women’s rights include Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Ernestine Rose, both of whom get good coverage in the book. The work of the anti-immorality campaigner Anthony Comstock in seeking to use the legislation he and his associates had inspired in an attempt to suppress the distribution of freethought and secularist works, targeting in particular the freethought publisher D. M. Bennett, whom he managed to have jailed having tricked him into selling him an immoral pamphlet and sending it through the post, this being the charge, however, Comstock’s real aim, as Ms. Jacobi notes, was to close down Bennett’s successful journal the Truth Seeker. In this he failed.

It may well be that in the coverage of individual Secularists one could wish for more detail, as in the case of Emanuel Haldeman- Julius. His success as a publisher is recounted, indeed his Little Blue Books sold in their hundreds of millions, but there is no mention of the attention FBI’s chief J. Edgar Hoover’s animosity and his attempts to have Haldiman-Julius indicted as a communist, however, unlike so many others Haleman-Julius’s great wealth made this difficult because he could afford to hire good lawyers. He was certainly a sort of ambivalent socialist but he never a member of the Communist Party, even if he did publish a gushingly uncritical biography of Stalin written by Joseph McCabe, although this was during the war when Stalin was very, much an `Uncle Joe’ figure. One might add that Ms. Jacoby says Haldeman-Julius also published an edition of the bible, though while I possess the Stalin biography I have. never. I saw a copy of this, though it would not surprise me if he did, it’s rather too long for the Little Blue Book format, or the other series, the Big Blue Books, in which the Stalin biography appeared. 

This is a truly fine book, even if it is not about organised, secularism as such, and here the title is a bit misleading, but secularism in broad terms, or secularisation if you prefer. Nevertheless it deserves a place on the shoes of anyone interested in freethought history. It is well indexed, and has a bibliography that has extended my books wanted list considerably. What is more, for a well-bound, illustrated hardback the price is reasonable, there are many paperbacks that nowhere approach its value priced far in excess of it. I do not often describe a work as being essential reading, but in this case I have not the slightest hesitation in doing so.

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Most biographers of Thomas Paine say something about his early religious associations. There is general agreement that his father was a Quaker and his mother an Anglican, that he was baptised and confirmed into the Church of England and that as a boy in Thetford he preferred the quiet meetings of the Friends to the services at the parish church. It is also well known that, although he continued all his life to admire the Quakers for their good works, he could never completely accommodate himself to their life-style. 

Though I reverence their philanthropy I cannot help smiling at the conceit that, if the taste of a Quaker had been consulted at the creation, what a silent and discoloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have bloomed its gayeties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

But if neither the Church nor the Quakers attracted him, where could he find a place to belong religiously?¹

John Keane, in a biography that has been acclaimed as ‘definitive’, has suggested that as a young man Paine had a significant ‘brush with Methodism’: 

In Thetford Paine reportedly heard John Wesley preach. Wesley’s journal also records that when Paine was living in Dover, Benjamin Grace, Paine’s employer, took him along to the Methodist chapel on Limekiln Street, where Paine, aged twenty-one, confessed himself a believer and later preached sermons to the congregations (‘the hearers’) who gathered in that chapel. 

This gives the impression that Wesley, who frequently visited Dover, had himself supplied this important information. Only those readers who turn to Keane’s copious endnotes will realise that the Dover story did not come from Wesley but from the editor of the 1916 edition of his Journal, who recorded it in a footnote. The authority he cited was an article that had appeared ten years previously in the Methodist Recorder, in which an anonymous contributor — following a day trip to Dover — assembled a few miscellaneous facts about the local history of Methodism. After describing the chapel that Wesley had opened in Limekiln Street the writer added this interesting snippet:

The building in question, now a public house, has one queer association. Tom Paine, author of The Age of Reason, read a sermon there one day. He was apprenticed to Mr.Grace and went with him to class and chapel. He professed to believe, and was so far trusted that when a minister failed one day Tom Paine took the service. 

Since the information was provided by a leading Methodist whose family had lived in Dover for generations there is likely to be some truth in it. In fact, as Keane points out, the story is attested by this inscription in a copy of Wesley’s Sermons on Several Occasions taken to America in the nineteenth century: 

Out of this volume Thomas Paine, author of The Age of Reason, used to read sermons to the Congregations at the Methodist Chapel in Dover when they were disappointed of a Preacher. At that time he belonged to the Methodist Society in that place. 

Be that as it may, Paine did not stay long in Dover. After only a year he moved to Sandwich where he remained until 1761 and, according to a local tradition, sometimes preached ‘as an independent or a Methodist’ to small gathering in his own Iodgings.² 

Paine’s involvement with Methodism, it is suggested, did not end on his departure from Sandwich, as Keane speculates that during the year and a half he spent as an Excise officer in Grantham (1763-4) he relieved his boredom either by ‘socialising with patrons of the George inn’ or by ‘mixing with local Methodists’ — activities that, in view of the Wesleyans aversion to alehouses, might be considered barely compatible. The mixing with Methodists is said to have continued after Paine, following brief sojourns in Alford and Diss, eventually moved to London in 1766. Here for a time he eked out a living by teaching in an academy run by Daniel Noble, which, according to Keane, ‘stood in a forest of private-enterprise schools then shooting up in London. 

Some of these charitable schools were run by Methodists and Methodist sympathisers for labourers’ children, who were taught godliness, craft skills, and their social duties and rights. Noble’s academy was one of these.

It is, however, rather misleading to include this academy in the general run of ‘charitable schools’. Noble was no ordinary private school proprietor and was almost certainly not a ‘Methodist sympathiser’. Such a description is not borne out by the brief biographical details Keane himself supplies. 

[Noble] had been well educated at the Kendal Academy under Caleb Rotheram (a friend of Joseph Priestly) and at Glasgow University. He had a large private library and was well known for his Dissenting sympathies and active support for civil liberties. 

Apart from the confusion of Rotheram with his son of the same name (who was Priestley’s contemporary) his description of Noble, taken from a letter written to the Times Literary Supplement by the Baptist historian Ernest Payne, is accurate and to the point.³ 

Keane considers it likely that Paine assisted Noble in the work of preaching to his Seventh Day Baptist congregation at Mill Yard. He also gives some credence to a tradition that during his brief residence in London he preached in the city’s open fields. Here again, it is suggested, there was a significant link with Methodism. 

The Methodists, for whom he had preached in Dover and Sandwich, welcomed lay preachers in the struggle for ministers especially among London’s poorer folk, whose souls they thought could be saved from wickedness and whose lives could be defended in the name of humanity and civilization. 

But would they have welcomed Paine as a preacher if they had known that he was an associate of Noble? As Ernest Payne pointed out, Noble ‘belonged to a group of Baptists who added Arian sympathies to their Arminian and Sabbath-Keeping views’. . Moreover, as another Baptist historian W. T. Whitley expressed it, ‘he did not escape the drift towards Socinianism• which was prevalent nor did he seem to have been attracted by the revival under the early Methodists.⁴ 

Paine in Lewes 

As it transpired, Paine’s association with Noble was not to last long. Early in 1768, having been appointed to the post of Excise officer there, he left London and moved to the Sussex town of Lewes, where he took lodgings in the house of a tobacconist named Samuel alive. Keane states that he acquired this accommodation ‘through Methodist connections’, but, since there were no Wesleyans in or around Lewes at this time, this is highly unlikely. It was not until the nineteenth century that Lewes became what he calls ‘a town of Nonconformist churches’. Apart from the Quakers there were in Paine’s day, only two non-Anglican congregations there and both belonged to ‘Rational’, as opposed to ‘Evangelical’, Dissent. These were the General Baptists in Eastport Lane, and the mixed Presbyterian-Independent congregation at the Westgate Meeting, to which Ollive — who lived next door at Bull House — himself belonged. By this date the General Baptists and the Presbyterians, who were eventually to unite to form a single Unitarian congregation, were drawing closer together. Therefore it may be that, metaphorically speaking, Paine came to Bull House by way of Eastport Lane. The little congregation meeting there formed part of a General Baptist association extending throughout Kent and Sussex with which Noble, who was later to be invited to become their ‘Messenger’ or district minister, was closely associated. When needing help to find lodgings in Lewes it would have been only natural for Paine to turn to him.⁵ 

Where did Paine worship during his six years in Lewes? Lodging where he did, it is likely that, if he went anywhere, it would be to the Westgate Meeting. ‘Bull Meeting’, as it was also sometimes known, and Bull House had originally been one building and the wall of partition between them remained thin. Indeed, if Paine stayed in bed on a Sunday morning he might have heard the singing of psalms next door. On occasion he might have been inclined, if only out of courtesy, to accompany the 011ives to their family chapel. It is said that it was here that he went with Samuel’s daughter Elizabeth in March 1771 to exchange vows before going to be legally married to her at St. Michael’s church over the road. It is likely, however, that he was never formally a member of the Westgate congregation. The shilling a year that he agreed to pay to the trustees was not a membership subscription. It was, as he expressed in a letter to them in 1772, ‘an acknowledgement for their sufferings the droppings of rain’ which fell into the meeting- house yard from a structure that he had erected above it.⁶ 

Had he attended services at Westgate Paine would probably have approved of the preaching of Ebenezer Johnston, the liberal- minded Scotsman who had ministered there since 1742. Like Noble he had been educated at a Dissenting academy and well grounded in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. Although none of his sermons survive it is certain that, like all the Rational Dissenters, his emphasis would not have been upon the saving work of Christ but upon ‘practical religion’. At a time when many Protestant Dissenting congregations were experiencing divisions and schisms, Johnston succeeded — possibly by being ‘all things to all men’ — in keeping his people together. Although probably not himself a Socinian, he would have tolerated heretical views if he encountered them. And so if Paine, in the course of conversation, had expressed doubts about the Atonement or the Trinity or even gone so far as to question the whole idea of revealed religion, Johnston would not have been shocked.⁷ 

It is not certain where Paine stood theologically during his time in Lewes, but it is clear that he was mentally on the move. For many people their early 30s are formative years and for Paine, who was regularly exercising his critical faculties and speaking skills in debates at the local Headstrong Club, they may have been specially so. If, as Keane suggests, he was the ‘P….’ who wrote a satirical poem entitled ‘An Arithmetical Paraphrase of the Lord’s Prayer’ printed in the Lewes Journal in July 1771, he may by then have reached a Deist position. Perhaps his anger against injustice had already led him to reject revelation and question the truth of what Noble had said in a 1767 sermon about ‘the wisdom of Christ’: 

It is certainly proof of the wisdom of Christ that he did not at all interfere in civil matters or make such declarations in behalf of the common rights of universal mankind as could only have tended to draw down the whole fury of the secular power upon all his followers. 

By the time he left Lewes in 1774 it is likely that Paine, never one to worry about drawing down fury, would have openly disagreed with this statement and with Noble’s conclusion that philosophy must always be ‘assisted by Revelation’.⁸ 

Conclusion 

Which then had the greater influence on Paine as a young man — Wesleyan Methodism or Rational Dissent? John Keane is evidently convinced that it was Methodism. In a sub-section of his book entitled ‘The Methodist Revolution’ he considers the effects of Paine’s involvement with the Wesleyan movement. He contends that historians have misunderstood Methodism, wrongly seeing it as ‘a reactionary protest against Enlightenment reason and a movement that seduced its followers into conformism’. On the contrary, he says, Methodism ‘fed the modem democratic revolution in mid-eighteenth century England by offering a vision of a more equal and free community of souls living together on earth’ Although he admits that ‘the extent of Paine’s involvement with Methodism is uncertain’ he believes that it was primarily from this that the young man derived his egalitarianism, his passion for justice and his conviction that individuals were morally responsible for their own conduct. Several sentences begin with statements such as ‘Methodism demonstrated’, ‘Methodism showed’ or ‘Methodism convinced him’. Moreover it was Methodism that allegedly provided Paine with ‘the exhilarating view, traceable to the Dutch theologian Jacobus Arminus, that Christ’s sacrifice and atonement meant that all men and women might be saved’. 

‘You are steeped in sin, and there is nothing in you which merits God’s goodness’, the young Paine may have told his nervous and spellbound congregations in Dover and Sandwich, rephrasing words from other Methodist preachers that he had heard in action. ‘Yet remember the new light of God’s grace shines equally upon the poor and the rich. God is ready to welcome you — all of you — as His children so long as you strive to attain His grace and live the holy life which allows you to enter into His Kingdom’. 

But do these sound like the worst of a man who had been (at the age of seven or eight) ‘revolted, by a sermon on the Atonement and had ever since ‘either doubted the truth of the Christian system or thought it to be a strange affair’? Although the Wesleyan doctrine of the Atonement was more liberal and humane than that of the Calvinistic Methodists it is doubtful if it could ever have been acceptable to Paine, whom the whole idea of God sacrificing his own son was repugnant.⁹ 

Because of his distaste for the orthodox ‘Christian system’ it is likely that Paine responded positively to the heterodox preaching of Rational Dissenters such as Daniel Noble. Although, as Keane points out, Noble ‘preached Arminian views’, his Arminianism was very different from Wesley’s. While Wesley’s position was close to that of Arminius himself (as introduced into England by the Caroline divines), Noble’s was that of a later generation of Dutch Remonstrants, whose views had been introduced into England by Limborch and Locke. Having been steeped in Locke’s philosophy at Kendal academy, Noble was more concerned with enlightening men’s minds than with saving their souls. His Arminianism, to borrow a phrase from Geoffrey Nuttall, was not ‘of the heart but ‘of the head’.¹⁰ 

Some idea of what Noble’s preaching was like can be obtained from a sermon he delivered during Paine’s time in London, entitled ‘Religion, perfect Freedom’. It is full of references to such things as `the providence and moral government of God’, the ‘Sovereign Being who is able to make all things work together for good’ and the ‘laws of benevolence which are the true spirit of the Gospel’. ‘Is it not evident’, he asked, ‘that the pure and undefiled religion of Jesus bears a very friendly aspect to the cause of civil liberty?’ This is a very different tone than that of the average Methodist sermon with its heavy emphasis on sin and personal salvation. Is there not a foretaste here of what Paine was to write in The Age of Reason? Could not Noble’s preaching have helped to convince him that ‘the oral duty of man consists in imitating the moral goodness and beneficence of God’ and that ‘everything of persecution and revenge between man and man, and of everything of cruelty to animals, is -a violation of moral duty’? Apart from the reference to cruelty to animals, which shows Paine to have been far ‘ahead of his time’, the phraseology could have been lifted from almost any Rational Dissenting sermon.¹¹

Was it not from the Rational Dissenters rather than the Methodists that Paine derived the belief that his religion was simply ‘to do good’? Is it not likely that, as Ernest ‘Payne suggested, his association with Daniel Noble was ‘of some importance for the young man’s intellectual and spiritual development’? Judging by ‘A Sketch of the Character of the late reverend and learned Daniel Noble’ published in The Protestant Dissenters’ Magazine some years after his death he sounds like a man after Paine’s own heart. 

He had very enlarged ideas of the rights of others and was, upon principle, a thorough friend to the civil and religious liberties of all mankind. In conversation he was open and liberal, and at the same time serious and instructive. 

By all accounts Ebenezer Johnston of Lewes was a man of similar temper. Could the author of The Age of Reason have found better mentors than these two very rational Dissenters?¹²

References

1. T. Paine. The Age of Reason. Paris, 1794. 82-3. 
2. J. Keane. Tom Paine: A Political Life (1995). 46, 544 n.29; N. Cumock. Ed.. The Journal of the Rev. John Wesley, Vol.8 (1916), 3, in The Methodist Recorder, 16 August, 1906, 9. 
3. Keane, op.cit, 55, 60-1. E. A. Payne, ‘Tom Paine Preacher’, The Times Literary Supplement, 31 May, 1947, 267. 
4. Keane, op.cit., 62; Payne. back, W. T. Whitley, Seventh Day Baptists in England, Baptist Quarterly, n.s., Vol. 12 (1947), 265. 
5. Keane, op.cit., 62-3; W. T. Whitley, ‘Daniel Noble’, Baptist Quarterly, n.s., Val (1922), 137. 
6. J. M. Connell, The Story of an Old Meeting House, 2nd edn (1935), 64- 6; Keane, op.cit., 76-7. 
7. Connell, op.cit, 55-60. 
8. Keane, op.cit., 70; D. Noble, Religion, perfect Freedom: A sermon preached at Barbican. March 1, 1767, 25-7. 
9. Keane, op.cit., 45-9; Paine, The Age of Reason, 80-81. 
10. Keane, op.cit, 61; C. G. Bolam et. AL, The English Presbyterians (1968), 22-3; G. F. Nutthall, The Influence of Arminianism in England’, in, G. 0. McCulloch, ed., Man’s Faith and Freedom (1962), 46-7. 
11. Noble, op.cit, 19-20, 26-8; Paine, The Age of Reason, 116. 
12. The Protestant Dissenters’ Magazine, Vol.5 (1798), 441-2. 

Dr. Jeremy Goring is a member of the Thomas Paine Society and is a former Dean of Humanities at Goldsmiths College, University of London. He is the author of, Bum Holy Fire: Religion in Lewes Since the Reformation, which was published by the Lutterworth Press in 2003. 

Reprinted from the Transactions of the Unitarian Historical Society.

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