La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique. Carine Lounissi. 894pp. Paris Honore Champion 2012. ISBN: 978 —2-7453-2359-0. £139.06. 

This fundamental contribution to Paine’s political thought, based on a Ph. D thesis at the Sorbonne, deserves to be translated into English so that it becomes available to all Anglophones interested in the subject. Dr Lounissi places his writings in context by examining the literature on which he apparently drew for inspiration, and also by discussing the often hostile reactions that they provoked. 

One can only say that previous political thinkers appear to have influenced Paine because he notoriously cited very few authorities in his publications and insisted that his ideas were original. Thus when critics dismissed Common Sense as being derived from John Locke he denied that he had ever read Two Treatises of Government. There were contemporaries who took him at his word that his political thought was homespun. Edmund Burke declined directly responding to the Rights of Man claiming that Paine had ‘not even a moderate portion of learning of any kind. He has learned the instrumental part of literature, a style, and a method of disposing his ideas, without having ever made a previous preparation of study or thinking—for the use of it’. 

Notwithstanding this, commentators on Paine’s political philosophy have sought to trace it back to previous philosophers. Thus despite his own disclaimer some have insisted that he was influenced by Locke since, even if he did not read his works, Lockean ideas were ‘in the air’, or he absorbed them ‘by osmosis’. Lounissi concludes that, while at first sight Paine’s thought often seems Lockean, on a deeper comparison between them differences emerge. For example both place the origins of government in a contract in which individuals agreed to set one up. Superficially these are similar if not identical models. But on closer examination they have significant differences. Locke accepted any government which was established by the contract — monarchy, aristocracy, democracy or, as he claimed was the case in England, a mixture of these. Paine by contrast denied that the original contract could set up any hereditary form of government since it could not bind future generations. Only a polity in which the people had a voice was legitimate. 

Despite her scepticism Lounissi concludes that Paine’s contractual theory was sown in a Lockean soil. She also finds echoes in Paine of the contractual theories of Algernon Sidney and Rousseau. On the latter she is on firmer ground as Rousseau was one of the writers whom Paine did cite, along with Montesquieu, Voltaire and other philosophes, in Rights of Man. One of Paine’s hostile critics lamented that France had been a ‘generous and gallant nation’ before it was ‘unhappily sophisticated by the late — forged philosophy of ingenious, immoral vagabonds, such as Rousseau and Paine’ As with all direct quotations from English authors Lounissi commendably translates this into French in the text but quotes the original in her footnote on page 185. 

The footnote cites the original in the edition of Political Writings of the 1790s edited by Gregory Claeys, in eight volumes published by Pickering and Chatto in 1995. These publishers have rendered a great service to students of Paine with this publication and also that of Thomas Paine and America 1776 — 1809, published in six volumes in 2009 of which Kenneth Burchell is editor. In her discussion of the reception of Paine’s works Lounissi draws frequently on these collections of contemporary works. 

It might be expected that a French scholar would be more informed about Paine’s career in France than about his activities in America. Dr Lounissi, however, is a specialist in the civilisation of the United States at the University of Rouen, with a particular interest in the history of the early Republic. Her book demonstrates familiarity with politics and political theory on both sides of the Atlantic in the late eighteenth century. Thus she points out that the constitutional arrangements for the United States outlined in Common Sense owed much to Benjamin Franklin’s plan for a union of the colonies spelled out at the Albany Congress of 1754. 

Although his proposals were sketchy, leading some to argue that Paine was more concerned with the negative task of bringing down governments rather than the positive problem of replacing them, Lounissi shows that in America he did contribute to the constitutional debates of the revolutionary era. He was not directly involved in the drafting of the radical constitution for Pennsylvania in 1776. This did not prevent his critics, led by John Adams, from associating him with its provisions for a unicameral legislature elected annually by universal adult male suffrage. He certainly supported it, at least initially, in several publications. Again he had no part in the deliberations at Philadelphia in 1787 which resulted in the American Constitution, being overseas in England at the time. But he did approve it to the point of recommending its adoption by the British. 

Paine did have a direct input into the drafting of the abortive French constitution of 1793, being appointed to the committee chaired by Condorcet charged with drawing it up. Unfortunately, as Lounissi points out, it is impossible to discern precisely what his role in the process was, though she does deduce that parts of the document were influenced by passages in Rights of Man, while the prefatory declaration of rights owed much to Paine too. He also had a say in the debates which resulted in the setting up of the Directory in 1795. Although his contribution to them, mainly objecting to the restriction of the franchise, has been long known, Lounissi’s familiarity with the French sources adds details not available elsewhere. 

She also demonstrates a formidable knowledge of English sources. For example, she places discussion of the welfare proposals in the second part of Rights of Man and in Agrarian Justice in the context of the debate on the poor laws in the late eighteenth century. Her research unearthed an anecdote about Paine unknown to his biographers. Thomas Ruggles, in The History of the Poor published in 1793, recounted how he had recently sat next to Paine at a dinner, who informed him that, when his grandfather was an overseer of the poor at Thetford fifty years before, the poor rate was under £40. Now it was between £300 and £400. “In a short time if this evil is not stopped the friends of liberty will, with the greatest ease, walk over the ruins of the boasted constitution; its fall wants no acceleration from the friends of Gallic freedom.’ To this a gentleman instantly replied ‘Thomas, thy wish is father to the thought’.” 

After discussing Paine’s ideas on poverty and property Lounissi proceeds to investigate his republicanism. She concludes that he was not a republican in the eighteenth — century tradition of the commonwealthmen. These, also known as classical republicans, argued that governments always sought to reduce the liberty of their subjects and that it was the duty of the virtuous citizen to be constantly vigilant to detect attempts to do so and resist them. One method rulers employed to distract citizens from their machinations was to corrupt them, for instance by encouraging trade in luxury goods, which allegedly reduced their will to defend their rights. Classical republicans were therefore opposed to commercial expansion. Paine by contrast welcomed commerce and industry, not only because they stimulated economic growth but also because he believed free trade helped to disseminate ideas of liberty in other areas of human activity. 

Lounissi also investigates Paine’s credentials as a historian. He announced his intention of writing a three – volume history of the American Revolution and then of giving an historical account of the French Revolution. Neither of these ambitious projects was ever realised. As she observes, Paine had a certain talent for missing rendezvous with historiography. His only major contribution to the history of the American Revolution was an open Letter to Abbe Rayne! objecting to his interpretation of it. Raynal put the quarrel between Britain and the colonies down to a dispute about the right to raise taxes. Paine insisted that the British government all along plotted to provoke the Americans into violent resistance to its measures in order to deprive them of their liberties. 

Paine absorbed what he had so far written on the Revolution in France into the first part of Rights of Man. Just as his account of the American conflict was written to correct Raynal, as Lounissi observes, so that of the French was to put Burke right. She checks Paine’s account of the events he describes and demonstrates that he frequently got them wrong. In summing up his accounts of the two revolutions she concludes that he was more a theorist than a historian of them. 

Paine’s second sojourn in America, following his return from France, is a period of his life that has been frequently skipped over quickly. Yet during his last few years Paine continued to publish quite prolifically. Lounissi and another French scholar, Marc Belissa, are now doing justice to his later works. For as Lounissi points out, even if these publications did not necessarily add new aspects to his thought, they are nevertheless important. Thus his political writings against the Federalists led by John Adams contributed to the debate over whether the ideals of the American Revolution were in danger until they were rescued by Thomas Jefferson. 

After dealing with Paine’s last years Lounissi ends the book with another account of his political activities in France. Thus she goes into detail on his role in the trial of Louis XVI, and publishes three appendices of contributions he made in the debates on the king’s fate. Two of them have not previously appeared in any collection of his writings, while only inaccurate versions of the third were ever published. 

This exhaustive investigation of Paine’s political thought, which covers all his speculative writings except those on religion, is a colossal achievement. Its range is indicated by the bibliography, which takes up sixty five pages. It is a pity that the index is confined to the names of people mentioned in the text, and even then omits some. But a comprehensive index would have made an already lengthy book unwieldy and more expensive. 

The post BOOK REVIEW: La Pensee Politique de Thomas Paine en Contexte: Theorie at Pratique appeared first on .

In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel! communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

The post Thomas Paine’s Astronomy  appeared first on .

The country may have celebrated the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee in spectacular style this year, but is everything really happy and glorious with the monarchy in 21st Century Britain — or is it time for Britain to become a republic? 

A committee member of the Thomas Paine Society UK was asked to join in this live debate in front of a 160 strong at the Brighton Dome Studio Theatre in November 2012. Paul Myles agreed to join in the Question Time style event. There were four panellists, all of whom gave a 5 minute opening and closing statement. The audience joined in either by asking questions or taking part in the snap opinion polls via the electronic voting system. 

The opening theme was : What can we learn from monarchies that have become republics in the past? Does the issue even matter in the modern world? 

The panel of 4 experts included: 

Graham Smith, who heads the campaigning organization Republic , and has been outspoken on issues including Prince Charles’s lobbying of Government departments, and which is calling for an honours system decided by the people; 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo , historian and royal commentator. One of North America’s leading royal commentators, he is an expert in monarchy, protocol, honours and British traditions, Rafe is the former editor of Burke’s World Orders of Knighthood & Merit. He is a trustee of the Canadian Royal Heritage Trust and a Research Associate at the leading public policy think tank ResPublica; 

Richard Whatmore, Professor of Intellectual History and the History of Political Thought at the University of Sussex, whose interests include the history of democracy, the French Revolution and the Enlightenment. 

Paul Myles of the Thomas Paine Society UK, which promotes the revolutionary thinker’s contribution to democracy and freedom; 

Graham Smith opened with a clear republican argument, that the monarchy is an outdated and quirky establishment, which does not add to the nation, not even in tourism terms. 

Rafe Heydel-Mankoo was clearly pro monarchy, and took the familiar pro monarchical argumentative line, stability, 1000 years of history, glorious in the reigns. His later arguments were nuanced, acknowledging the need for some change. 

Richard Whatmore brought gravitas and accuracy to the debate, and argued that the European Union is much more important over the long term than anything the UK may struggle with locally. 

Paul Myles took the position for disestablishment of the Church of England. Paul suggested that this was an achievable aim, and would re-balance our society into a modem state over time. He pointed out that on the world map of secularity the UK was showing as yellow meaning “ambiguous” on this matter. Rafe agreed with Paul that England and Iran were the only two nation states with unelected clergy in their legislative chambers. 

The first vote was 75% in favour of England becoming a republic, this showed the republican leanings of the mostly local audience. In conversation with Graham Smith and Rafe Heydel-Mankoo this was markedly different to many previous debates in the UK where these two regularly lock horns. 

The debate was very lively with a lot of audience participation, the panellist’s cut and thrust was matched by audience intervention and the passion really showed at times, both sides of the debate. Chillingly there was a moment where a young student member of the audience claimed the absolutist monarch from his home country in Africa was good and benevolent for all and he did not understand why we were debating authority. After a comment by Rafe that the polls had never shown such a high rating for the Royal Family in comparison to the leading politicians Myles riposted that that was like comparing the BBC “Eastenders” with “Question time”, that one was emotional and frivolous and the other a serious attempt to deal with the issues of the day. 

One of Rafe’s arguments was the continuity of glorious monarchs in England over a thousand years, this point was efficiently dismissed by Myles and Whatmore pointing out the enforced interruption by Cromwell and by bringing up Thomas Paine’s comment about William the Conqueror being ” a bastard son of a whore”, as the start of that thousand year history. . Whatmore also pointed out the Royal System had placed a crown on more than one ” idiot”. 

The evening went with a real swing, and notwithstanding the heat ended amicably, with the final vote showing no change in the audience position. The feedback from this event, one of a series of topics, was very favourable, perhaps showing that there is an appetite for a debate of this kind. 

The Sussex Salon is a roundtable event where academics, practitioners and commentators share their views on hot topics. The Sussex Salon Series is organised by Dr Ruth Woodfield, a University of Sussex sociologist and Director of Widening Participation for the School of Law, Politics and Sociology.

The post The Sussex Salon Debate Of November 2012 On: Is It Time For The UK To Become A Republic?’  appeared first on .

Religion For Atheists. Alain de Botton, London Hamish Hamilton. Hardback ISBN 978-0-241-14477-0 £18.99 

Alain de Botton describes his book as a non-believers’ guide to the uses of religion. Looking at religious practices, he thinks we have thrown the baby out with the bathwater in our modern secular society. He looks only at the bathwater, he believes sacramental processes are needed to form the gel of a caring community. At a low level, he fails to notice the squabbles these generate; what happens when flowers are arranged in a church to the dislike of certain parties, and similar issues? 

How can the ‘nice’ bits of religion be separated from their ideologies which have generated fear, hatred and persecution ? Practically all enlightened progress since the Renaissance has been made in the face of opposition by representatives of religion. Paine, and his publishers were no exception. 

Atheism until recently was only admitted with caution. This book comes close on the heels of other publications taking a ‘soft’ approach to atheism; Londoners may note this is akin to waiting for a bus, then several turn up at once! 

In 2008, the English translation of French philosopher Andre Comte-Sponville’s, The book of Atheist Spirituality¹ appeared. This attempted to re-discover a spiritual heritage lost through being too closely intertwined with religion. Comte-Sponville writes, “it is possible to do without religion but not without communion, fidelity or love”. De Botton finds these latter essential qualities found in religion! A third book, Ariane Sherine’s compilation, The Atheist’s Guide to Christmas (2009)² was a lighter look at how non-believers can celebrate the winter solstice; it contained contributions from, among the usual suspects, Dawkins and Grayling. Taking a more robust view, Robert Stovold’s, Did Christians steal Christmas? (2007)³ is an historical stance on pagan and more modern origins of the December festival. 

De Botton is a non-believer of Jewish parentage, a multimillionaire, founder of The School of Life’ and proponent of a vast atheist temple. He is often heard on the radio and television. But there is a great deal missing in this book. 

Religion for Atheists is a curious book. The author has nostalgia 

for something he never experienced. But he finds remnants in Jewish, Christian and Buddhist religions which appeal to his sense of community which these faiths provide. I have heard this called ‘belonging’ rather than ‘believing’. At the outset he dismisses debates about the truth of any religion as “the most boring and unproductive question one can ask”. I have been involved in discussions about the existence of god and I’m inclined to agree. There are no answers to convince those of the differing camps. De Botton sees only the good he wants to see in religion. Nineteenth century secularists, Bertrand Russell and Richard Dawkins might never have existed. In this book we are stuck with the old conventions of BC and AD, not the updated form of BCE and CE. 

The longest chapter deals with education. The author derides too much concentration on grades and exam performance. This may be good; education, education, education was the mantra of New Labour in 1997. What we got was war, war, war. De Botton finds the concentration of book learning in such as John Stuart Mill and Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth century at the root of our move from true education. As he has a double-starred first in history at Cambridge, he should know! 

In this book of some 300 pages, there is lots of white space, and also paintings and photographs; some Old Master paintings, albeit only in black & white, enhance the text while other pictures leave the reader wondering as to their significance. The word Islam, and the religion associated with it, get no mention. He loves so much about the rites and rituals; but male circumcision in Judaism and Islam is not included. As this practice is considered barbaric by some, and certainly rarely consensual, it provides further examples of de Botton’s blinkered approach. He admires the spirit of neighbourliness, the joining of congregations for singing, communion and feasting. He extols the way religion brings abasement of monarchs at feet washing ceremonies for the poor and its lack of concern with worldly success or wealth. He should tell that to the Vatican City and those who shunned the ‘occupy’ camp at St Paul’s recently. The tents may have deterred some paying visitors to the Cathedral, but otherwise it was the nearby Starbuck’s customers who were most discomfited! 

So what are we left with? The word secular is used in the sense of non-religious, not the purist definition of separation of church and state touted by the National Secular Society. Humanism, as a positive code of morality without religion or superstitious back-up fails to gain entry. Yet new ways of celebrating a life at time of death, as well as baby naming and weddings are the most common source of knowledge about humanism and the British Humanist Association. These ceremonies without god are on the increase year on year. 

De Botton applauds all the wonderful human gatherings and festivities generated by religious organizations; he also praises the works of humans in music, poetry, art and architecture. True many patrons have been found through religion for the creation of these artefacts. But there are many secular equivalents, and just a few which have been borne out of non-religious ethical groups. In London, Conway Hall is home of the South Place Ethical Society; its roots may have been religious, but it has long dropped the connection to become a centre of humanist thought and action. Above the proscenium in the main hall are proclaimed Shakespeare’s words: ‘To Thine Own Self Be True’. In Leicester is the even older Secular Hall, with statues of Socrates, Owen, Paine, Voltaire and, perhaps surprisingly, Jesus. 

In the nineteenth century Auguste Comte put forward ideas for a Religion of Humanity, with institutions and buildings for ‘secular churches’. This did not succeed; de Botton sees in Comte recognition that humans have a need for religion. Durkheim, one of the founders of sociology, used this as part of his theory about the part religion plays in human ‘camaraderie and solidarity’. De Botton recognises our sense of anomie, but barely accepts attempts to overcome this in the past. 

Visiting cathedrals, ministers and churches are notable aspects of modern pilgrimages, which we call tourism. I think walking into a centuries old country church gives one a feeling for history and the past in a very human way; it has nothing to do with religious observance, it is just somewhere to find a place that has been trodden by forbears and find out about their lives. Before a certain date, all records of birth, marriage and death were in the parish registers. 

In common with some of his generation, de Botton finds Buddhism offers ‘something’ missing from the Judeo-Christian tradition. Even Sam Harris, in his 2004 The End of Faith⁴ veers in this direction; though Harris spoilt it by suggesting Islamic terrorists should be nuked before they get us! 

Apart from the humanist rites of passage mentioned, there is a clear need for this ‘something’ in our lives as non-believers. In the 1960s, with more optimism than we appear to have now, Richard Robinson wrote in An Atheists’s Values⁵: “We need to create and spread symbols and procedures that will confirm our intentions without involving us in intellectual dishonesty. The need is urgent today. For we have as yet no strong ceremonies to confirm our resolve except religious ceremonies., and most of us cannot join in religious ceremonies with a good conscience. When the Titanic went down, people sang ‘Nearer my God, to thee’. When the Gloucester’s were in prison in North Korea they strengthened themselves with religious ceremonies. At present we know no other way to strengthen ourselves in our most testing and tragic times. Yet this way has become dishonest. That is why it is urgent for us to create new ceremonies, through which to find strength in these terrible situations. It is not enough to formulate honest and high ideals. We must also create the ceremonies and the atmosphere that will hold them before us at all times. I have no conception how to do this; but I believe it will be done if we try”. That is the challenge. 

References

1. THE ATHEIST BOOK OF SPIRITUALITY. Andre Comte-Sponville. Bantam 2008 ISBN 978-0-553-81990-8 
2. THE ATHEIST’S GUIDE TO CHRISTMAS. edited by Mane Sherine. Friday Books 2009 ISBN 978-0-00-732281-9 
3. DID CHRISTIANS STEAL CHRISTMAS. R J Stovold. National Secular Society 2007 ISBN 978-0-903753-05-3 
4. THE END OF FAITH. Sam Harris. W W Norton 2004 ISBN 0-743-26809- 1. 
5. AN ATHEISTS VALUES. Richard Robinson, Oxford 1964 ISBN 978-0- 631-159704. 

The post BOOK REVIEW: Religion For Atheists appeared first on .

In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible, Michael Walzer, 232 pages hardback, New Haven and London, Yale University Press, ISBN 978-0-300-18044-2. 

This is a book about a book, and not just any book! The Sepher Torah (Old Testament) remains a Holy Book for three religions. True the Jews set more store by the Biblical commentaries of the Talmud, the Christians by the New Testament, and the Muslims by the Koran, but the Old Testament remains an important weapon in the armoury of religious ideology and the machinations of priesthood. 

Michael Walzer is not a theologian, he admits he has only a schoolboy’s knowledge of ancient Hebrew and a layman’s understanding of the history and archaeology of the ancient world. He is a professor of social science at the Institute for Advanced Study, Princeton and his aim is to examine the ideas about politics, the understandings of government and law that are expressed in the Hebrew bible. 

Israel, he tells us, was founded twice once as a kin group and once as a nation. Both times there were alleged covenants with the god YHWH. Yet the stories of these events were written long after the events not as history but as religious propaganda. The story of the covenant of Abraham with YHWH is an obvious explanation for the replacement of human sacrifice with animal sacrifice much of which was appropriated by the Levite priesthood. 

Walzer accepts that many Jews were in exile in Egypt although not actually employed as slave labourers building the treasure houses of the ruling class. He accepts they were led out by Moses and Aaron and after wandering in the desert set about conquering and stealing the land of their more advanced Canaanite neighbours in the process forging another covenant with YHWH. They were led by a mysterious religious artefact, the Ark of the Covenant supposedly containing the commandments given to Moses, which equally mysteriously vanished just as later the Christian Holy Grail would vanish. 

Archaeology suggests they were marginalised Canaanites who coalesced into twelve tribes and whose priesthood adopted the faith of YHWH. Moses allegedly the faith of what was a Kenite mountain and thunder god when he wed into the tribe in the Land of Midian, Yet the use of the plural Elohim in the first lines of Genesis suggests the Jews were originally polytheists. 

This is understandable considering the local goddess cults were more fun and far more sexy than the rather austere worship of YHWH. In Kabbalah there is a female figure, the Shekinah, who sits on the right hand of God. And in song the Sabbath is depicted as a bride eagerly awaiting the coming of her husband. 

For three hundred years the Jews were ruled by those mysterious figures the Judges, the Bible names twelve of them. Walzer writes that the whole of the Jewish intelligentsia, such as it was, was engaged in arguing about the law. In practice they were deciding what the content of the Sinai covenant should be and also legitimising their own role. Ultimately the Law, like everything else, was God’s. But with anything that in origin is really human there are contradictions and the Talmud refers to the contradictory works of Hillel and Shami as both being “the words of the living God.” 

After the prophet Samuel the failing of the rule of the Judges became obvious and the Jews adopted a monarchy which eventually split into two rival kingdoms, Israel and Judea. These two kingdoms not only fought threatening foreign powers but often fought each other. The Jewish nation had been founded on the genocide of seven Canaanite nations, monotheism being a convenient ideological excuse for this. Polytheism was far more tolerant and multicentric. Now the Jews often found themselves conquered by more powerful, more technically advanced nations, many of them vanishing into the dominant population. Ten of the twelve tribes vanished as did the dynasty of the David kings. Jesus may well have laid claim to this, if he existed at all. 

As Walzer points out the Old Testament starts out as the history of a very dysfunctional family. The struggle continued except that now it is a struggle for a royal inheritance. The common people fade into the distance. 

The Bible has much to say about kingcraft and priestcraft but nothing about democracy or a republic, common terms in ancient Greek politics Not surprisingly Messianism, the hope for future redemption in which a messiah plays a leading role, became popular among the subjugated masses. Jesus either deliberately adopted or was painted into this role. In comparison to the Jewish savages, the Greeks were miles ahead! In political and philosophical terms we owe far more to them than to the Jews of antiquity. 

One may think all this is very ancient history but the past, even the past of a savage tribe of genocide! killers, affects the present. The British monarchy is obviously based on that of ancient Judea which in turn borrowed from the more civilised Egypt. The monarch doubles as head of church and state and on coronation is anointed with oil, the monarchy still commands the armed forces, the Prince of Wales is circumcised according to Jewish ritual and the monarch rules by the Grace of God and is defender of the faith. And there are strong links between Masonry, which sees its roots in the construction of the Temple by Solomon, and the monarchy. And Queen Victoria was a British Israelite, she thought the Anglo-Saxons were descended from a lost tribe. 

As humanity emerged from the long dark night of the Middle Ages, the ideas of religious and monarchical hegemony began to be challenged. Foremost among those doing this important work of demystification and enlightenment was Thomas Paine in his Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, works still full of meaning for today’s troubled world. 

Marxist historians have written about ancient Egypt and Greece. It is high time their incisive dialectical analysis, the materialist conception of history, was fully applied to the ancient Middle East. 

The post BOOK REVIEW: In God’s Shadow: Politics In The Hebrew Bible appeared first on .

George Chalmers, Thomas Paine’s first and most hostile biographer, maintained that he ‘commenced public writer in 1771. The electors of New Shoreham had lately shone with such uncommon lustre, as to attract parliamentary notice, and to incur parliamentary disfranchisement. A new election was now to be held, not so much in a new manner, as on new principles. The poets of Lewes were called upon by Rumbold, the candidate of fair pretensions, to furnish an appropriate song. Our author obtained the laurel, with three guineas for his pains.’ Chalmers went on to remark ‘it may then be doubted whether it be strictly true, what he asserted in his news — paper altercations, in 1779, that till the epoch of his Common Sense, he had never published a syllable’. Since no copy of Paine’s election song appears to have survived, however, it seems reasonable to assume that it never was published but was simply sung.¹ 

Chalmers version of the New Shoreham bye — election is also unreliable in other respects. It did not take place in 1771 but on 26 November 1770. Moreover, so far from being consequent upon an alteration of the qualifications for voting in the constituency, it provoked one. The bribery employed in it was so blatant that it could not be disregarded even in an age which turned a blind eye to corruption at the polls. Consequently a parliamentary inquiry was held, which resulted in the number of electors in the borough being increased from about 100 to about 800. Many of those who enjoyed the franchise there had formed a so — called Christian Society, ‘ostensibly for charitable purposes, but really to arrange the sale of the borough’s parliamentary representation’.² The general election held in 1768 had resulted in the return of two members unopposed. The subsequent death of one of them in October 1770, however, necessitated a bye – election to fill the vacant seat. The Christian Society determined on selling their votes to the highest bidder. Initially five candidates stood. One offered to spend £3000 and to order the construction of a ship of 600 tons, an attractive inducement in Shoreham where shipbuilding was a major industry. Thomas Rumbold then made an offer of £34 or £35 for each member of the Society, which they found more appealing and accepted. This overt deal so appalled the returning officer that he announced he would be no party to it. At the polls he refused 76 votes given to Rumbold by members of the Society and returned one of his rivals, John Purling, even though only 37 had voted for him. This led Rumbold to petition parliament objecting to the return of Purling. Though the Commons upheld Rumbold’s claim to have been rightfully returned, the House insisted on an investigation into the proceedings at the election. This uncovered such corrupt practices that ‘it was proposed to disfranchise the borough; this, however, was thought too dangerous a precedent’.³ Instead an Act was passed in 1771 disfranchising 69 named members of the Christian Society and increasing the electorate eightfold. 

Tom Paine was thus involved in one of the most blatantly corrupt elections held under George III. No principle appears to have been at stake in it, even though Rumbold ‘opposed the ministry’.⁴ All three candidates who contested the bye – election were members of the East India Company. Rumbold, the candidate who commissioned electoral propaganda from Paine, and paid him for it, had returned from India in 1769 with a fortune calculated at between £200,000 and £300,000.⁵ He was intent on buying a seat in parliament and found one up for sale in the borough of New Shoreham. Why he also felt the need for an electoral song is hard to explain. That Tom Paine, the future advocate of parliamentary reform, obtained the commission is even harder to square with his reputation for political radicalism on the eve of his departure for America. On the contrary, as Moncure Conway observed of this episode, ‘he appears to have been conventionally patriotic’.⁶ 

Shortly after his arrival in Philadelphia, however, Paine published an essay on ‘the Life and Death of Lord Clive’ which was highly critical of the type of ‘nabob’ whose election campaign he had supported in Shoreham.⁷ Clive’s conduct in India had been investigated by parliament in 1773 and, although he had been exonerated, many felt that his career with the East India Company had been characterised by corruption and extortion. Paine clearly shared this view, for his ‘reflections’ on Clive were far from complimentary. On the contrary, he described India as the ‘loud proclaimer of European cruelties’ and the ‘bloody monument of unnecessary deaths’. He pictured Clive returning home ‘loaded with plunder’, then going back to a country where ‘fear and terror march like pioneers before his camp, murder and rapine accompany it, famine and wretchedness follow in the rear’. Clive, ‘resolved on accumulating an unbounded fortune’, is there ‘the sole lord of their lives and fortunes [and] disposes of either as he pleases’. Although he was acquitted by parliament, ‘some time before his death he became very melancholy — subject to strange imaginations — and was found dead at last’. Paine imagines Clive in the final stages of his life unable to enjoy his wealth, which reminds him of the ways in which it was acquired. Thus port wine appears like blood to him. And in the end he was suspected of taking his own life. 

Clive died on 22 November, just a week before Paine arrived in Philadelphia so he cannot have known of the nabob’s death before he left England. But he would have been aware of the parliamentary enquiry into Clive’s conduct in India, which was held in May 1773. Paine himself was probably in London while it was being held, for he spent much of the time between the fall of 1772 and the spring of 1773 in the capital pursuing the claim of his fellow excisemen to an increase in their salaries. Though his own printed Case of the Officers of Excise was supported by George Lewis Scott, one of the commissioners of the excise, it failed to find favour with the Treasury or the prime minister, Lord North, who rejected the claim in February.⁸ Paine became very disillusioned with politics as a result of this rebuff, and the scales seem to have fallen from his eyes when he heard of the proceedings against Clive. He could even have been thinking of his own reaction when he observed in his ‘Reflections’ on them “Tis the peculiar temper of the English to applaud before they think. Generous of their praise, they frequently bestow it unworthily; but when once the truth arrives, the torrent stops, and rushes back again with the same violence’. At all events, the Clive affair marked a turning point in the political stance of Paine from being the recipient of favours from Rumbold to becoming a major critic of British imperialism.

Endnotes 

1. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. It has been suggested that a poem, ‘Farmer Shorter’s Dog Porter’; which Paine published in the Pennsylvania Magazine in July 1775, was the song in question. Although it involves a farmer who had voted in the Shoreham election, which shows that Paine was familiar with that event, being subsequent to the polling it cannot have been used for electoral purposes. Francis Oldys [George Chalmers], The Life of Thomas Pain (1791), pp. 26 — 7. 
2. The House of Commons 17 — 1790 edited by L. B. Namier and J. Brooke (3 vols, History of Parliament, 1964), i. 397. 
3. T. H. B. Oldfield, An entire and complete history Political and personal of the boroughs of Great Britain (3 vols, 1792), iii, 56. 
4. In 1786 Rumbold topped a list of wealthy nabobs with a fortune estimated at £300,000. Tillman W. Nechtman, Nabobs: Empire and Identity in eighteenth — century Britain (Cambridge, 2010), p. 13. 
5. Moncure Daniel Conway, The Life of Thomas Paine (2 vols, 1998), i, 24. 
6. The complete works of Thomas Paine edited by Philip Foner (2 vols, 1969), ii, 22 — 27. 
7. George Hindmarch, Thomas Paine: The Case of the King of England and his Officers of Excise (1998). 
8. Foner, ii, 25. Paine documents the essay with quotations from the proceedings of the committee set up to investigate Clive’s activities, which he presumably obtained before he left England.

The post The Role Of The East India Company In Thomas Paine’s Radicalisation  appeared first on .

English radical poetry has a long and honourable tradition dating back to at least the 17th century. Paine played a small but significant role in this tradition. He was a great influence on the Chartist movement which arose in the 1830s to demand the vote for working men. One of the leading Chartists was Deptford-born George Julian Harney. 

In the 1850s Harney produced two papers, The Red Republican, which was followed by The Friend of the People. An essential feature of both publications was a poetry for the people column. Some of the contributors such as Shelley, Walt Whitman, the French political writer Armand Carrel and Ernest Jones were well known. Jones wrote some of his poems in his own blood while in prison. Some used pen names such as Bandiera, Spartacus, John The Workman, Voteless Traveller and the initial R. Some seemed distinguished such as George Sydney Smith MP and the Rev. John Jeffrey. About some of them, like Sheldon Chadwick and George Hooper we know little or nothing. 

Although he appears to have contributed to neither of Hamey’s publications, a friend and prolific poet was John Bedford Leno. Leno was born in Uxbridge in 1826. He had very little formal education and was taught to read by his mother. He graduated from rural post boy to printers’ apprentice becoming works foreman. At one time he financed his out of work activities by gambling at which he was quite good. 

He came under the political influence of the Chartist Fred Farrell and set up a local branch of which he became secretary. Finishing his apprenticeship he took up various printing jobs. He claimed to have tramped a thousand miles and often supported himself by singing and reciting poetry. With £40 raised at a benefit concert he bought his own press. On this he printed the Spirit of Freedom and Working Man’s Advocate, which was edited by Gerald Massey. Eventually he moved to London where he set up shop in Drury Lane. There he met the Russian Revolutionary Alexander Herzen who persuaded him to print literature to be smuggled into Russia. Alas this never happened. Herzen was arrested by the Tsarist authorities and exiled to Siberia. In 1851 he became a member of a committee appointed to meet the Magyar revolutionary Lajos Kossuth. 

Leno helped form a group called the Propagandists which offered to give lectures to working men free of charge. Out of this emerged the Universal League for the Material Elevation of the Industrious Classes. Leno was the chair. This in turn led to the formation of the Reform League which again advocated the franchise for more working men. 

Leno took part in its demonstrations, the biggest since Chartist times, as did Charles Bradlaugh. Some of these turned into violent confrontations between the people and the police. The railings at Hyde Park were torn down and used as weapons against the police. Leno must have felt some sense of justice. On coming to London, one of his first experiences was to be battened by a plain clothes policeman at a demonstration. 

In 1864 he was part of a committee appointed to welcome to London the Italian revolutionary Garibaldi. Previously when the Emperor Napoleon III had visited, Leno had led the protests. During the 1868 General Election he was the agent for former Propagandist member George Howell who was contesting Aylesbury. But Liberal finance, while it kept independent working class candidates out of the contest, was not much for wealthy Tories who could afford to have their voters driven to the polls. 

In the 1870s Leno was a member of the Manhood Suffrage League and the Democratic and Trades Alliance Association consisting mostly of Soho tailors and shoemakers. Leno recited his poetry at many of the dubs which sprung up to cater for the political, educational and recreational needs of working people. In his old age and riddled with gout Leno was warmly welcomed by William Morris when he went to attend one of the socialist lectures held in Morris’s home in Hammersmith. Leno described this event as “an oasis in the desert of an old man’s life”. Writing in the Socialist League’s Commonweal he described himself as “an old socialist”. No longer able to work, he was financially supported by several Radical MPs and received a gratuity of £50 from the Prime Minister William Gladstone. Leno died in 1894. 

Gerald Massey had a poem The Red Banner published in the very first issue of The Red Republican and made several more contributions mostly to The Friend of the People. One poem was entitled Kings are but giants because we kneel. Over two issues The Friend of the People April 26 and May 3, 1851, reviewed his Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love published when he was just 22. The reviewer wrote: “Gerald Massey is a partisan of the right against the wrong-justice against oppression-liberty against tyranny-the suffering many against the pitiless few.” 

Massey was born near Tring in 1828. At a tender age he was put to work in the local silk mill for a shilling a week for twelve hours a day and more. When the mill burned down he took up the equally arduous job of straw plaiting. This afflicted him with ague. Later he secured more congenial employment only to lose it for attending the Chartist demonstration on Kennington Common in 1848. But he soon found more congenial work as secretary of the Tailors Association. Massey was a self-taught Egyptologist. He was one of the first to make comparisons between the myth of the Egyptian God Horus and the Christian myth of Yeshua Bar Yosif. Both were allegedly born of a virgin on December 25 (The Greek word for virgin in the New Testament is a mistranslation of the Old Testament Hebrew word which just means a young woman). Both raised the dead, both were crucified and rose again on the third day. His work opened the way for later investigations by secularists. 

William Morris was himself no mean poet — after Tennyson’s death he was seen as a potential poet laureate. Queen Victoria would not have been amused. Morris was invited to speak in Oxford by William Hines, a chimney sweep active in agricultural trade unionism, and founder of the Oxford and District Socialist Union. He published Labour Songs for the Use Of Working Men and Women, stating : “It is time labouring folk had their own song book. There is no other way of keeping up good fellowship and brotherhood between labouring folk than by song and music.” In 1887 the Socialist League had published Echoes of the Coming Day: Socialist Songs and Rhyme. It had been edited by Fred Henderson who became a leader of the Independent Labour Party. 

Sadly many of England’s radical poets have been hidden from history by neglect. It is time to rescue so that their calls to resist tyranny and fight for freedom can inspire new generations.

The post Poetry For The People  appeared first on .

Introduction. 

Putting the world to rights: The presumptuous audacity of Thomas Paine. 

How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at thirteen (Gilbert Wakefield, Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, would call him ‘the greatest ignoramus in nature’), a man who had failed as a skilled craftsman, as a teacher, as a shopkeeper, as a street preacher, as a petty customs official in the Excise, dismissed more than once and a sometime debtor and bankrupt, how dared such a nobody, such a non-achiever even dare to think about the ends and means of government, about the basis of a just society, about the meaning we can give life? Some of the fundamental questions that Paine pondered and tried to answer were: 

Are humans essentially anti-social animals, whose lives are, in the philosopher Hobbes’ words, just ‘nasty, brutish and short’? 

Do we have to be ruled by some absolute, hereditary, hierarchical authority backed by force? 

Is humanity capable of instituting an alternative to war? 

Is Christianity the only true religion? 

Is any religion true? 

But Thomas Paine did not merely articulate such fundamental questions in his secret thoughts, he also talked about them and dared to write about them. Think of his audacity when he, an almost penniless, recently very sick, immigrant Englishman, not long off the boat, started telling the people of North America in print what they should all now do, first in relation to slavery (they should abolish it) and then in relation to Britain. He called on Americans to revolt against his own country, and even called it just ‘Common Sense’ for them to do so. 

Or think how Paine, a few years later, dared to take on Edmund Burke, Burke, the graduate of Trinity College Dublin, former barrister at the Middle Temple, former Private Secretary to the Secretary for Ireland, and then Private Secretary to the Prime Minister and himself an MP. Paine told Burke that his reactionary championing of the ancient regimes of Europe after the fall of the Bastille was wrong. His answer to Burke in Rights of Man was a trumpet call to ‘begin the world anew’: the British should abolish the hereditary principle of monarchy and aristocracy and substitute a just redistribution of wealth through graduated income tax. 

Paine did not engage only Burke but also with many other dominant spirits of his age, including Benjamin Franklin, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, General Lafayette, Danton, Condorcet, Marat, even Napoleon. In his dedication of the first part of Rights of Man to George Washington, Paine hoped that its principles of freedom would soon become universal. In his Dedication of the second part of his Rights of Man to General Lafayette, he urged the latter to export the French Revolution to the whole world – above all to the despotism of Prussia. 

Finally, in his Age of Reason, Paine took on God Himself and denied the divinity of Christ whom he called simply ‘a virtuous and amiable man’: ‘I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church’. 

Mocked and caricatured in his own day as presumptuous little ‘Tommy Paine’, where on earth did Paine get this unexampled, defiant audacity from? But it was not unexampled. Paine did have exemplars for ‘speaking Truth to Power’. Ultimately, behind Thomas Paine, I suggest, there lies the Epistle of James: the most radical, angry exhortation to social justice in the whole New Testament. Let me remind you: 

…[Be] ye doers of the word, and not hearers only… My brethren, have not the faith of our Lord Jesus Christ… with respect of persons. 

If there come into your assembly a man with a gold ring, in goodly apparel, and there come also a poor man in vile raiment and ye have no respect to him that weareth the gay clothing, and say unto him, sit thou here in a good place; and say to the poor, Stand thou there, or sit here under my footstool: 

Are ye not then partial in yourselves,… [Ye have despised the poor…[If] ye have respect to persons ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, poor…[If] ye have respect to persons, ye commit sin;… What doth it profit, my brethren, though a man say he hath faith, and have not works? Can faith save him? And if a brother or sister be naked, and destitute of daily food, And one of you say unto them, Depart in peace, be ye warmed and filled; notwithstanding ye give them not these things which are needful to the body; what do it profit? Even so faith if it hath not works, is dead … For, as the body without spirit is dead, so faith without works is dead also… 

Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted, and your garments are moth-eaten. Your gold and silver is cankered; and the rust of them shall be a witness against you… Ye have heaped up treasure together for the last days. Behold, the hire of the labourers who have reaped down your fields which is of you kept back by fraud, crieth, and the cries of them which have reaped are entered into the ears of the Lord of Sabaoth’. 

That had been written, perhaps by Jesus’s brother, 1,700 years before Paine’s birth but was available to him of course as a young child and a young man, in the Authorised version of the King James English Bible. The Epistle of James would resonate repeatedly among the early Quakers and in Paine’s own writings. 

Much nearer to Paine, both in place and time, as exemplars, were these early English Quakers – the Quakers of the recent persecution period 1650-1690. Moncure Conway, Paine’s first serious, sympathetic biographer wrote Iliad] there no Quakerism there would have been no Paine.¹ Was he right? 

Part One 

Who were the Quakers? 

Had there been no Civil War, or ‘Revolution’ as Paine himself called it, in England between1642 and 1651 there would have been no Quakerism, which began as a collective movement in 1652. The world had just been ‘turned upside down’ in Britain by that very recent war in which people had been asking – and killing each other over – fundamental questions about how to be a Christian and what kind of society Britain should be. The Parliamentarian ‘Roundheads’ believed they were fighting against royal tyranny and ungodliness; the monarchist Cavaliers believed they were fighting against mob anarchy and against hypocrites out to usurp power under the fig leaf of religion. 

Each side, of course, believed very sincerely that God was on their side. And this English Civil War, called ‘The Great Rebellion’ by the royalist Cavaliers, and ‘The Good Old Cause’ by their Puritan Roundhead opponents, had actually been the English Revolution – culminating in the trial and execution of the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1645 and of King Charles 1 – only very recently, in 1649. The men and women who would be convinced and converted to Quakerism just three years later at the beginning of the 1650s had sympathised with the Puritan, Roundhead side.

Some (though not George Fox), had even fought for Cromwell and Parliament against the king. They saw themselves in the tradition of the Protestant Martyrs burned at the stake under ‘Bloody Mary’ a century earlier – for instance Margaret Fell, ‘the Mother of Quakerism’, born Margaret Askew, was believed by some, mistakenly, to be actually descended from the famous Protestant martyr Anne Askew. During the Civil War they had often called themselves ‘independents’. Once the war had been won by Cromwell’s New Model Army and the Parliamentarians, many of these self- styled ‘Independent’ men and women remained restless ‘Seekers’, looking for spiritual leadership that might help them towards personal and social salvation. They would walk or ride many miles to hear a preacher who, they had heard, was a true man of God. Hence that great assembly of about a thousand or more Westmoreland Seekers at Firbank Fell, above Brigflatts, near Sedbergh, in Whitson, 1652, who heard George Fox tell them: ‘Let your lives speak’. He told them they had no need of a church or parish priest, but that they should all live their Christianity, emulating the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians as a Society of Friends. The ‘Valiant Sixty’ among those who heard Fox, then attempted to do just that, spreading their message of ‘the inner light’ in every man and woman out from the North Down to London, South, West and East – to Norfolk, the county of Thomas Paine. 

Although the Quakers’ creation of new congregations of ‘Friends’ in the 1650s came out of the spiritual turmoil of the Civil War, it was also a reaction against the brutal cruelty of that war. In fact George Fox had been moved to begin preaching a gospel of brotherly love already in 1646, right in the middle of the war. For is any war quite as terrible as the Civil War? – town against town, family against family, father against son, brother against brother, besieged women and children deliberately starved to death, prisoners deliberately mutilated and murdered after they have been promised pardon on surrender – and many other such atrocities – all in the name of ‘King and Country’ or else ‘For God and the People’. These very early Quakers were fired by a defiant, millenarian vision; they too wanted to turn the world upside down – but this time, unlike in the recent Civil War, by wholly non-violent means. Therefore immediately after the Civil War that had not brought about Jerusalem the Quakers preached and practised the alternative to war – non-violent resistance. Margaret Fell, the ‘Mother of Quakerism’ who would later marry Fox, wrote in 1660 to Charles II: 

We who are the people of God called Quakers, who are hated and despised, and everywhere spoken against, as People not fit to live… We are a people that follow after those things that make for Peace, love and Unity… we do bear our Testimony against all strife and wars… Our weapons are not Carnal, but Spiritual.

George Fox, 1661, delivered to Charles II a ‘Declaration from the Harmless and Innocent People of God, called Quakers against all plotters and fighters’. 

The Quaker Francis Howgilt, at his trial in Appleby said: 

It has been a Doctrine always held by us, and a received principle…that Christ’s Kingdom could not be set up with carnal Weapons, nor the Gospel propagated by Force of Arms, nor the Church of God builded by Violence; but the Prince of Peace is manifest among us and we cannot learn War any more, but can love our Enemies, and forgive them that do Evil to us…This is the Truth, and if I had twenty lives, I would engage them all, that the Body of Quakers will never have any Hand in War, or Things of that Nature, that tend to the Hurt of others. 

Following George Fox, the Quakers also opposed slavery and capital punishment. 

But if Quakers were so peaceable, why were they so persecuted in the 1650s, 1660s, 1670s and 1680s? Betrayed by local ‘informers’, arrested just for meeting to worship in silence in one another’s houses, or for refusing to attend their local church, they were heavily fined, imprisoned for months in filthy, stinking, dark holes – often below ground -, publicly stripped and whipped, stoned and even transported as slaves?. Under Charles II (1660- 1685), 13,562 Quakers were arrested and imprisoned; 198 were transported as slaves; at least 338 died in prison as a result of their injuries. It was in this same period that Bunyan the unlicensed Baptist preacher was in Bedford Jail and Richard Baxter, the Presbyterian minister who would not conform to the 39 Articles was tried in his frail and sick old age by the Chief Justice Judge Jeffreys. “What ailed the old stock-cole, unthankful villain, that he would not conform… He hath poisoned the world with his linsey wolsey doctrine”. Judge Jeffreys wanted the old man publicly whipped. But Baxter and Bunyan were individuals who were persecuted; the Quakers were persecuted as a collective body, an alternative, threatening counter- culture, a ‘Society of Friends’ that was a standing criticism of the wider dominant – and unfriendly – social fabric of Great Britain. 

The Reasons for the persecution: 

Quakers were seen as a threat to the given social order into which they had been born because they had many subversive beliefs and practices in addition to their refusal to bear arms. The refused to take their hats off in respect to ‘their betters’ because they were `no respecters of persons (cf. the Epistle of James above). This was not trivial; it was a traditional gesture of popular social protests and enraged ‘the better sort’. When one accused Quaker refused to take his hat off before the magistrate, the judge seized it, burned it and sentenced him to five months’ imprisonment. 

Quakers refused to bow courteously or to use the polite terms of address; for instance they refused to say ‘You’ to their ‘betters’ but called everyone the familiar ‘Thou’, like ‘Du’ in German or ‘Tu’ in French. They refused to . give any of their fellow humans a special title. If they lived under a monarchy, they would not say ‘Your Majesty’ to the King, but just call him ‘King’; they would not say ‘My Lord’ to an aristocrat or ‘Your Honour’ to a Judge, or even refer to anyone as ‘Sir’ or ‘Lady’, ‘Mr’ or ‘Mrs’. Instead, everyone was simply called by their first name and surname and addressed as ‘Friend’ by Quakers – even Cromwell, when Lord Protector of England, was addressed as ‘Friend Oliver’ by Fox. 

Quakers refused to swear any oath in a court of law because Christ had said ‘Swear not at all’. Again, in that same radical Epistle of James, we find : ‘above all things brethren, swear not, either by heaven, neither by the earth, either by any other oath: let your yea be yea; and your nay, nay. The truth was that everyone should speak everywhere and at all time, not merely in the witness box. But how could the non-oath taking Quakers be believed to be loyal citizens owing allegiance, or held capable of keeping any binding contracts, if they refused all oaths? 

Quakers refused to have any parson or minister, believing instead in their own Inner Light, that which is of God in everyone; they refused even to attend Anglican church services, that is ‘the prescribed national worship’, let alone pay their local Anglican parson his ‘tithes’ or church rates, no matter how often and how grossly their own goods were thereupon ‘distrained’, looted; half of their confiscated property being taken by those who had informed against them. Quakers maintained that there should be no paid ‘hireling’ ministers in Britain at all, which did not endear them to the professional clergy. And who knew what sedition, or incitements their meetings in one another’s houses might not be brewing, asked the magistrates? 

Finally, and perhaps worst of all in the eyes of their contemporaries, there even were many women Quakers, who followed their own Inner Light and preached in the streets as public missionaries who, when they were not in prison, travelled indefatigably throughout Britain and even the world, broadcasting the Quaker message of ‘that of God’ existing in every human being, including women. 

Thus 17th century Quakers seemed to be threatening the creation of an alternative, much more egalitarian society, and one that even included the spiritual equality of men and women. Quakers would not conform to church or state. And they were making thousands of converts. Where might it not end if almost everyone turned Quakers? Social Revolution? Already by 1660, i.e. in their first eight years, there had been at least 20,000 converts. In 1653 George Fox wrote: ‘0 ye great men and rich men of earth! Weep and howl for your misery that is coming [quotation from the Epistle of James]…the day of the Lord is appearing… All the loftiness of men must be laid low’. 

Alarmed, the Presbyterian Major-General Skipton, then in charge of London, had said in Parliament already in 1656: ‘[The Quakers’] great growth and increase is too notorious, both in England and Ireland; their principle strike at both ministry and magistracy’. It is not surprising, after all, that peaceable though they were, the Quakers were ruthlessly persecuted in an attempt to extirpate every one of them. How did they respond? They articulated their resistance, and testified to the principle of liberty of conscience. 

Quaker History of the Persecution. 

From the moment that they were persecuted, the late 17th century Quakers chronicled that persecution and their own un-budge-able, non-violent resistance. They wrote and printed pamphlets and letters to one another, above all to Margaret Fell, herself often imprisoned, and appealingly eloquently to the Magistrates, to King or to Parliament. 

In 1660 Richard Hubberthom wrote ‘[If] any magistrate do that which is unrighteous, we must declare against it’. This the Quakers judged the magistrates, and their social ‘superiors’, not the other way round. In 1664, after the Conventicle Act, that sought to banish Quakers to the West Indies, George Whitehead, who has been called possibly the most influential advocate of religious liberty in Britain,² ‘sheaved the judges their duty from the law and Magna Carta’. Every single example of arrest and punishment of Quakers was documented by a local Friend who could write a clear hand, naming both the local Sufferers and the local Persecutors on facing pages of their records.³ 

Thus Quaker solidarity and continuity was achieved through the creation of their own written accounts of individual and collective persecution. And it was upon these many local records, in addition to trial transcripts, that the amazingly comprehensive collective narrative compiled by Joseph Besse was based – The Suffering of the People Call Quakers for the Testimony of a Good Conscience 1650-1689. Thomas Paine was born precisely half way between these dates, in 1737. 

Besse title page: If they have persecuted me, they will also persecute you (John). For the oppression of the poor, for the Sighing of the Needy, now I will arise, saith the Lord” (Psalms). 

Besse’s Preface to the Reader:

‘It was an excellent observation… that God is tried in the fire, and acceptable Men in the Furnace of Adversity… Persecution is a severe test upon the Hypocrite and Earthly-minded. ‘When thou passest flub the Waters, I will be with thee..ffsalahr. A Measure of this holy Faith, and a sense of this divine Support; bore up the spirit of the People called Quakers for near 40 years together, to stem the Torrent of Opposition… The Messengers of it were entertained with Scorn and Derision, with Beatings, Buffetings, Stonings, Whippings and Imprisonment, Banishments, and even Death itself’ 

Just to give one vivid example of the persecution of a woman Quaker in Sussex there is the case of Mary Akehurst as summarised by Besse in his volume on Southern England, ch. 34, pp.711-712: 

1659… Mary Akehurst, a religious Woman of Lewis [sic], going into a Steeple-house there, and asking a Question of the Independent Preacher, after his Sermon, was dragg’d out by the people, and afterwards beaten and puncht by her Husband, so that she could not lift her Arms to her Head without Paine. She also suffered much cruel Usage from her said Husband, who bound her Hand and Foot, and grievously abused her, for reproving one of the Priests who had falsely accused her. Her Husband also kept her chained for a Month together, Night and Day. 

Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office Mary Akehurst’s neighbours won her release by pinning a written protest about her treatment on the Church door. She continued to testify to her Quaker convictions, although even after her husband had died, she was punished by the authorities time and again. David Hitchin’s Quakers in Lewes (1984), based on the full account held in the Public Record Office takes up the story: In 1670 she was distrained of goods worth £29 by false information. She appealed to the next Sessions and the informer, fearing be found a perjurer, fled. Her goods were ordered to be returned. In 

1672 William Penn visited her in Lewes. In 1673 she was reported by an informer priest, William Snatt, for meeting in a private house, fined £8.10 shillings, and her goods were taken worth £16.18 shillings. In 1676 she was fined £10 for meeting in a house in West FirIe. In 1677 she was indicted for nine months’ absence from church. In 1686 (27 years after asking her first question in St. Michael’s church) when old, sick and unable to walk without being held up on either side, she was carried off at midnight by bailiffs to prison. In Besse’s words, op.cit. p.734: 

One of the Bayliffs, being drunk, when he got on Horseback, with many Oaths and Threatenings had set her upon his Horse, and would not suffer her to take Necessaries with her, so that her Friends thought she could not live till she came to the Prison. But the barbarous Bayliff swore, that if she could not hold it to Prison, which was twenty Mlles, he would tie her, and drag her thither at his Horse’s Tail. Being brought to Horsham Jail, she was kept dose Prisoner there about seven Months, and then was removed to London and committed to the King’s Bench. In Oxford… In Cumbria… 

It was men like George Fox, Francis Howgill, Edmund Burroughs, Richard Hubberthom, George Whitehead and Robert Barclay, and women like Margaret Fell, Ann Blaykling, Mary Fisher and Mary Akehurst who were Thomas Paine’s fearlessly radical 17th century forerunners, speaking out for justice and civil liberty, including liberty for (non-violent) non-conformity. 

Part Two 

Paine’s own Quaker Background. 

Paine’s magisterial biographer John Keane stresses that Paine was the child of a mixed marriage – half Anglican, half Quaker and suggests that this must have led to his having a balanced, even detached, view of both orthodox and heterodox Christianity and hence to his championing of toleration. I myself see no reason to think that young Paine felt himself to be equally Anglican and Quaker. He is generally agreed to have been much closer to his Quaker father to whom he was apprenticed at thirteen than he was to his Anglican mother. And he actually recounts in The Age of Reason how shocked and alienated he had been when he was 7 or 8 years old, on hearing his Anglican aunt’s orthodox Anglican religious teaching of Original Sin and redemption through God’s allowing the crucifixion of his own son. Instead, when young Tom Paine attended Quaker meetings in Meeting House Lane, he would have heard Quaker neighbours testifying not to sin or damnation but to their feelings of love and unity and to the working of God’s mercy in their own lives; he would also have absorbed the practical mercy that Thetford Quakers gave out towards the needy, suffering members of their meeting. 

For in Thetford, Quakers collective self-organization had already been established soon after the start of the first Friends’ meetings there.³ 

Through democratic ‘Quaker discipline’ that included ‘elders’ and ‘overseers’ and monthly, quarterly and yearly meetings as well as women’s meetings, taking care of the poor, the sick, the old, the widowed and the orphans had been the Quaker way from the first.⁴ Their path-breaking schemes of providing accommodation, weekly allowances, legacies and gifts of fuel and clothing (we again remember the Epistle of James) gave Paine a lifelong Quaker ‘feeling for the hard condition of others’ as he himself would write in his letter to the town of Lewes later. There would also have been (as there still is) decision-making by consensus – ‘the sense of the Meeting’. Therefore, despite arguments and some defections, and criticism, Quakers managed to practice democratic consultation and to avoid continuous acrimonious splitting into ever smaller groups. Instead, they tolerated different approaches to Truth if sincerely sought, trusting in each Friend’s own moral and reasoned judgement, as he or she followed their ‘Inner Light’. 

We should also note that Quakerism is, and has always been, an outward looking faith. They believed from the first that Quakerism is something to be lived out in the world and this bonded them in shared efforts at humanitarian intervention. For the Quakers have never been short of others’ Sufferings’ that need addressing, the sufferings of slaves, prisoners, the disenfranchised, the starving, refugees, the victims of war and persecution. 

Quakerism already had an influence on Paine’s schooling, between the ages of 7-13. His father said he must not learn Latin because of the books thro’ which that language is taught – think of the semi-divine status claimed for the founding of Rome in the Aeneid or the city or the deity accorded the later Roman emperors or Caesar’s triumph list history in his accounts of his conquest of Gaul. Simon Weil called history ‘believing the murderers at their own word’. 

Did, during this period, young Paine read a copy of Besse’s Sufferings of the Early Quakers in the small Thetford Meeting House library? Or did his father, or a richer Quaker neighbour actually own a copy?⁵ We shall never know, but at the very least there must have been an inextinguishable orally transmitted tradition. As Sylvia Stevens writes in her monograph A Believing People in a Changing World: Quakers in Society in North-east Norfolk, 1690-1800: 

When Friends such as Mary Kirby and Edmund Peckover who were directly descended from a Quaker of the first generation, gave their [oral] ministry, they were doing so as people who linked to the past but spoke a message for the present 18th century Norfolk Quakers acknowledged, shaped and revered their own religious pasts but lived in their own time. 

What would young Thomas Paine have read or been told about the treatment of the Quakers, including his own kin, in Thetford, in Norwich and elsewhere in Norfolk, before he was born? And how would they have reacted? 

The written history of persecution of Norfolk Quakers, especially Norwich and Thetford (Source: Besse)

1660 the deposition of Samuel Duncombe on the breaking up of a meeting in Norwich: ‘[We suffered their] smiting, punching, cruel mocking… thumping on the Back and Breast without Mercy, dragging some most inhumanly by the Hair of the Head, and spitting in our Faces, abusing both men and women…[They] have taken the Mire out of the Streets and have thrown it at the Friends, some of them holding the Maid of the House whilst others daubed her face with Gore and Dung, so as the skin of her face could hardly be seen.’ 

For that ‘scandalous expression’ Duncombe and the other Quakers were sent to prison. Whereupon Samuel Duncombe wrote again to the Mayor and Aldermen, beginning ‘Friends, Our Oppression is more than we ought always to bear in Silence. And now we are upon the brink of Ruin by the loss of our Goods,… made harbourless in our own houses… And what would you have us do? Do you think we are only wilful and resolve so to be? Do you think these things are pleasing to our own wills as creatures of flesh and blood as you are also, to suffer? You must also expect Judgement – therefore be not high-minded, but fear – for the Lord can quickly blast your Honour and disperse your Riches. We cannot sew Pillows under your armholes, but wish you well as we do ourselves.’

Duncombe later sent a second letter from Norwich prison, beginning not ‘Friends’, this time, but ‘Magistrates!’ And continuing: ‘For complaining of injustice our liberties are taken from us, we are forced to lodge in straw’. 

In February 1665 at the Quarter Sessions held at Norwich Castle, Henry Kettle and Robert Eden both of Thetford, and two others, were convicted of the third offence in meeting together (see Conventicle Act) and were sentenced to be carried thence to Yarmouth, and from that Port to be transported for seven years to Barbados’ (i.e. as slaves). When Kettle returned after seven years, he was again arrested and imprisoned. 

In 1676, William Gamham, Mary Townsend and Robert Spargin of Thetford were distrained of their good worth £2.5 shillings. One Captain Cropley molested them and attempted to disperse their religious meeting by Force of Arms. And when they asked for his commission so to do, he showed them his rapier. And one of them not going at his command, he beat him on the Head with his Stick and kickt him on the Back to the endangering of his Life. 

November 1676, Samuel Dunscombe [again] reported how his house was forcibly entered; ‘officers bringing with them one Tennison and impudent Informer and the common Hangman. They tarried several days and nights in that home and kept Samuel Duncombe’s wife, then big with child, a Prisoner, suffering her to speak to no body and admitting none of the neighbours to come near her. The Goods they took were valued at £42.19 shillings’. 

1678 ‘George Whitehead and Thomas Burr were taken at a meeting in Norwich. Charles Alden, a Vintner and one of the singing Men in the Cathedral, rushed in calling out ‘Here’s Sons of Whores; here’s 500 Sons and Daughters of Whores. The Church Doors stand open but they will be hanged before they will come in there’. sand whilst George Whitehead was speaking, [Alden] cryed out ‘Put down that Puppy Dog! Why do you suffer him to stand there prating?’ 

These Norfolk Quakers were then sent to prison in Norwich Castle and again in 1680 for refusing to take the oath. On his release George Whitehead went straight to Hampton Court to plead with the King on behalf of his fellow-prisoners left 27 steps below ground in Norwich Castle dungeons – ‘They are burying them alive’, he told the King, whom he just addressed as ‘King’, ‘They are poor harmless people, poor Woolcombers, Weavers and Tradesmen, like to be destroyed’. The prisoners were only released two years later. 

1682 Anne Payne was committed to prison for ‘absence from National Worship’ (Many other Paines, or Paynes, in Norfolk suffered the seizure of their goods, and imprisonment). 

1684 saw an ‘excessive Seizure from two Norfolk farmers, John Roe and William Roe, who were fined £240 and had all their cattle, corn and households goods taken by the Sherriff’s Officers in East Dereham. ‘The behaviour of the Officers and Assistants and who made this seizure was very rude. They broke open the Doors, Drawers and Chests and threatened the Servants of the House with Sword and Pistol. To make themselves merry they roasted a pigg and laid so much wood on the Hearth that they set the Chimney on Fire with which, and their Revelling, Cursing and Swearing, they affrighted the wife of the said William Roe to the endangering of her Life; she being then great with child, was delivered before her lime, and the child died a few days later’. 

The persecution continued in Norfolk up to 1690. Such things are not soon forgotten. Whether or not young Thomas Paine, born in 1737, read a copy of Besse, so many were the oral accounts of the persecution period that he must have heard many examples from his father, from his paternal grand- parents and from other Thetford Quakers. It was still living memory and there can be no doubt at all on which side he and his father were on. It would simply not have been possible for him as a sensitive, spirited, indignant child and youth to have been equally pro-Anglican, on the side of the punishing ruling class, and on the side of their victims, the heroes and heroines of Quaker dissent. 

Part Three 

Paine’s writing on Quakers and on Quakerly principles. 

1768-1775: Paine in Lewes. 

Thomas ‘Clio’ Rickman, who would become Paine’s closest English friend and first devoted biographer (Paine would write part of the Rights of Man in his London home), first attached himself to Paine as his inspiring mentor when he was a youth in Lewes. ‘Clio’ Rickman was a ‘birthright’ Lewes Quaker on both sides of his family, the Rickmans being the dominant family in the meeting there. They first settled in Lewes around 1700 and were almost certainly related to, if not directly descended from, the Quakers Nicholas Rickman from Arundel who had been pitilessly persecuted in West Sussex decade after decade before 1690. Their common Quaker heritage and knowledge of Quaker persecution history would have been one of the bonds between the radical debating Paine of the Lewes Headstrong Club and his young admiring convert to radicalism, Rickman. ‘Clio’ Rickman himself would be disowned by the Lewes meeting for ‘marrying out’ but eventually died as a Quaker in London and would be buried in the Quaker burial ground in Bunhills Fields. He would publish Paine and give him sanctuary in London, and himself suffer as a publisher for his Paine connection. 

1775-1787 America. 

1775-80 Paine worked with Philadelphia Quakers in the first anti-slavery society in America, founded by the Quaker John Woolman. He wrote his first essay there asking the Americans to ‘discontinue and renounce’ slavery in African Slavery in America. 

1775. In his Thoughts on a Defensive War, he wrote “I am thus far a Quaker, in that I would readily agree with all the world to lay aside the use of arms, and settle matters by negotiation: but unless the whole will, the matter ends, and I take up my musket”, i.e. against the troops, including Hessian mercenaries, being employed by the British to put down the American struggle for colonial independence – ‘laying a Country desolate with Fire and Sword (Common Sense). 

Therefore, in 1776 in his Appendix to Common Sense, Paine opposed those conservative ‘Tory’, non-resisting Philadelphia Quakers who, in 1776, advocated reconciliation with the British King, Paine accused this group of rich Quakers, who, he said, did not represent all Quakers, of being not really neutral and peacefully above the conflict as they claimed by de facto partisans on King George III’s side, when they argued against resistance. Their very participation in political argument forfeited their claim to be apolitical quietists. They were really on the side of Mammon. Had Paine known of the actual degree of American Quaker economic collaboration with the British then going on behind the scenes, he would have been even more incensed.⁶

It is noteworthy that in the same Appendix Paine proves that he has read some Quaker persecution history in his admiring allusion to ‘the honest soul of [the Quaker Robert] Barclay’ and his quotation from Barclay’s Address to Charles 11, criticising persecution under Charles II, a King who having himself been oppressed ‘hest reason to know how hateful the oppressor is to both God and man’. 

Xmas 1776 The American Crisis – first essay by Paine advocating total resistance even unto death: ‘These are the times that try men’s souls… Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered;…’ show your faith by your works’ (Epistle of James). 

November 1778, 7th Crisis essay, Paine coined the phrase ‘Religion of Humanity’, i.e. humanity is the true religion. My religion is to do good’. 

1788-9 and 1791: England. 

1789 Letter to Kitty Nicholson: 

There is a Quaker favourite of mine at New York, formerly Miss Watson of Philadelphia ; she is now married to Dr. Lawrence and is an acquaintance of Mrs. Oswald; so be kind as to make her a visit for me. You will like her conversation. She has a little of the Quaker primness – but of the pleasing kind about her.

1789 -1790 and 1792-1795: France 

1793 attacked by Marat re clemency for King denounced for being a Quaker and therefore against death penalty.

1794 – 6: Paine on Quakers and Quakerism in The Age of Reason. Conway Introduction. Paine’s ‘Reason’ is only an expansion of the Quakers “inner light’. Paine was a spiritual successor of George Fox. He too had ‘apostolic fervour’. 

Part 1, Ch. 1. The author’s profession of faith. 

‘I believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy’. ‘My own mind is my own church’. 

Ch.111. The character of Jesus. 

‘He was a virtuous and amiable man. The morality he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some Greek philosophers many years before, by the Quakers since, and by many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any. 

Ch. X111 

My father being of the Quaker profession, it was my good fortune to have an exceedingly good moral education, and a tolerable stock of useful learning. Though I went to the grammar school, I did not learn Latin, not only because I had no inclination to learn languages, but because of the objection the Quakers have against the books in which the language is taught. 

And note how his first attempts to think and write about politics and government were determined by the principle in which he had been raised – I.e. Quakerism. 

The religion that approaches the nearest of all others to true Deism, in the moral and benign part thereof, is that professed by the Quakers: but they have contracted themselves too much by leaving the works of God out of their system. Though I reverence their philanthropy, I cannot help smiling at the conceit that if a Quaker could have been consulted at the creation, what a silent and drab-coloured creation it would have been! Not a flower would have blossomed its gaieties nor a bird been permitted to sing. 

Part 2, Conclusion to The Age of Reason: 

The only sect that has not persecuted are the Quakers; and the only reason that can be given for it is, that they are rather Deists than Christians. They do not believe much about Jesus Christ, and they call all scriptures a dead letter. 

1797, Letter to Camille Jordan who was anxious to restore Catholic privileges, inc. church bells, in post-revolutionary France. 

The intellectual part of religion is a private affair between every man and his Maker, and which no third party has any right to interfere. The practical part consists in our doing good to each other. But since religion has been made into a trade, the practical part has been made to consist of ceremonies performed by men called priests; true religion has been banished; and such means have been found out to extract money even from the pockets of the poor, instead of contributing to their relief… 

No man ought to make a living by Religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another… 

The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. These men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of meeting, and do not disturb their neighbours with shows and noise of bells… Quakers are equally remarkable for the education of their children. I am a descendent of a family of that profession; my father was a Quaker, and I presume I may be admitted as evidence of what I assert. … Principles of humanity, of sociability, and sound instruction for advancement of society, are the first objects of studies among the Quakers… One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. 

1803, Letter to Samuel Adams. 

…”the World has been overrun with fables and creeds of human invention, with sectaries of whole nations against all other nations, and sectaries of those sectaries in each of them against each other. Every sectary, except the Quakers, has been a persecutor. Those who fled from persecution were persecuted in their turn. 

1804, Prospect Papers. 

It is an established principle with the Quakers not to shed blood, Re revelation: the O.T. usage ‘the word of the Lord came to such a one – like the expression used by a Quakers, that ‘the spirit moveth him”. 

The Quakers are a people more moral in their conduct than the people of other sectaries, and generally allowed to be so, do not hold the Bible (i.e. the O.T.) to be the word of God. They call it ‘a history of the times’. 

Conclusion 

Paine himself was not a Quaker, because he was not a Christian and the Quakers were Christians, however unorthodox and radical. Nevertheless, his Quaker heritage from his father gave him a birthright example of principled, fundamental criticism of the corrupt, caste-ridden, unjust society into which he was born. 

The persecution history, in particular, of his Quaker forebears transmitted to Paine both by word of mouth and in print in his youth, must, I believe, have been truly inspirational ‘strengthening medicine’ as he in his turn dared to ‘speak truth to power’. There is no foundation for conviction like saeva indignatio. And Paine, like the early Quakers, would also face trial for ‘sedition’, would be exiled by a fearful aristocratic government and would be imprisoned and risk death for his convictions – the latter, ironically, at the hand of revolutionary extremists. 

Paine acknowledged the idea rightness of the Quaker Peace testimony and would only ever see justification in a purely defensive armed struggle. Paine helped start the American Quaker campaign in Philadelphia to abolish slavery and the slave trade. 

Paine remembered the Society of Friends’ organization of care for its weakest members as a template for the possibility of organized social welfare that he would expound in Rights of Man. His allusions to Quakerism and the practice of the Quakers in his writings whether in America„ in France or in England, were overwhelmingly respectful, even at time reverential – ‘I reverence their philanthropy’. 

So far I have implied the influence of Quakerism on Paine was as positive as it was profound. But was it wholly positive? Perhaps we should consider the comment made by the eighty year old portrait painted by James Northcote, himself a political liberal, as reported in Hazlitt’s first Conversation with Northcote, in 1829. 

Nobody can deny that [Paine] was a very fine writer and a very sensible man. 

But he flew in the face of a whole generation; and no wonder that they were too much for him, and that his name became a byword with such multitudes, for no other reason than that he did not care what offence he gave them by contradicting all their most inveterate prejudices. If you insult a room-full of people, you will be kicked out of it. So neither will the world at large be insulted with impunity. If you tell a whole country that they are fools and knaves, they will not return the compliment by crying you up as the peak of wisdom and honesty. Nor will those who come after be very apt to take up your quarrel. It was not so much Paine’s being a republican or an unbeliever, as the manner in which he brought his opinions forward (which showed self-conceit and a want of feeling) that subjected him to obloquy. People did not like the temper of the man. 

The first Quakers had certainly known how to get up the noses of their late 17th century persecutor. They knew they were in the right, that they were ‘the Children of God’ and those who were against them were mere ‘hirelings’ and ‘worldlings’. But they did not thereby endear themselves to their world. As Besse himself said: Nor could it be expected that a Testimony levelled both against the darling Vices of the Laity and the forced maintenance of the Clergy should meet with any other than an unkind reception.⁷ Was Paine too much like those earliest Quakers, forfeiting persuasiveness in the certainty of his own exclusive rightness – and so ‘[meeting] an unkind reception’? 

Twenty years earlier than Hazlitt’s Conversation about him with Northcote, on his deathbed in March,1809, Paine had expressed his last wish: 

“I know not if the Society of people called Quakers, admit a person to be buried in their burying ground, who does not belong to their Society, but if they do, or will admit me, I would prefer being buried there; my father belonged to that profession, and I was partly brought up in it.” 

According to Keane, a local New Jersey Friend, Willett Hicks: 

‘conveyed Paine’s request sympathetically to the local Friends, but it was refused. Hicks reported back that the society felt that Paine’s own friends and sympathizers “might wish to raise a monument to his memory, which being contrary to their rules, would render it inconvenient to them”….Paine sobbed uncontrollably’ …

Notes

1. Conway, Moncure, Life of Thomas Paine…. 1892, vol.1, p. 11. 
2. See Oxford DNB entry on Whitehead, See Public Record Offices for the earliest mss. Quaker archives, listing local ‘Sufferers’ and ‘Perpetrators on facing pages, month by month, year by year, 1652-1690. 
3. Those among the Valiant Sixty’ at Firbank Fell in 1651 who had gone to ‘ publish truth’ in Norwich and Norfolk in 1653-4 pi included Christopher Atkinson from Kendal, Ann Blaylding from Drawell, Richard Hubberthome from Yealand, James Lancaster from Walney, Dorothy Waugh from Preston Patrick and George Whitehead from Orton. 
4. Keane p. 24: they believed their mutual aid enabled them to return in Spirit to the grace of the earliest ‘primitive’ Christians. 
5. Quote intro. to facsimile of Besse re their distribution. 
6. See Conway, vol.1, pp. 78-77. 
7. Besse, Introduction.

The post `No Respecter Of Persons’: Thomas Paine And The Quakers: The Influence Of 17th Century Quaker Persecution History On Paine’s Radicalism  appeared first on .