Reynolds’s Newspaper – Sunday 08 December 1895
THE PAINE EXHIBITION.
An exhibition of objects of historical interest connected with Thomas Paine and his contemporaries was opened on Monday at South-place Institute, Finsbury. The exhibits, which number about 1,000, have been sent from different parts of England, America, and France, among the exhibitors being, Mr. Monroe D. Stern, Dr. Cliney J. Groes, Mr. J. Willatt, Mr. J. B. Elliott and Dr. Steele (Philadelphia), Mr. Edward Smith, Mr. A. Hammond, Mr. G. J. Holyoake, Mr. J. Mazzini Wheeler, Mr. Bridgman Bunner, Mr. Ambrose Vago, Mr. P. W. Clulow, etc. Mr. John M. Robertson (Paris). The collection of portraits included the lay figure and also literary, portrait, engraved by Sharp, with Paine’s commentary upon the action to Rickman on the back. All efforts to trace the original painting by Romney have been unsuccessful, and its present to be hopelessly lost. There was also on view a complete set of the original editions of Paine’s books, and the manuscript from which the memorial to Mazzini, titled State Minority in France, was printed. Also being the only manuscript discovered of any extended work of Paine’s. The exhibition included, in addition, broad-sheets, caricatures, medals, medleys, and other objects associated with incidents of the struggle caused by Paine’s writings. Under a glass shade was shown a bust of Paine’s brain and a lock of his hair, and there was also an engraving of the Angel of Islington, has it was when Paine wrote there on his “Rights of Man.” In November, 1790. The death mask of Paine and bust of Edmund Burke were among the other principal exhibits.
Arrest warrants to us: The Daily Telegraph of the 3rd instant contains an amusing paragraph with reference to Thomas Paine, which ought not to be allowed to pass without notice, because it displays an amount of ignorance and prejudice which is astonishing. It is well known that the proprietor of that paper is a Jew, and if that be so how can he, through his editor, venture “Tom Paine” of having no faith in God, when we read Paine’s own declaration that he believed in one God, and no more? Does a Jew believe in more than one God, or, for that matter, does a Quaker or a Unitarian, like Mr. Joseph Chamberlain, believe in more than one? And, therefore, in that respect how was Paine any more without faith in God than the Jews? Clearly, or Unitarian? It is perfectly evident that the writer of the paragraph in question can never have read Paine’s Age of Reason, or his Rights of Man, or your Democratic Readings “of last week, or he would not have penned such nonsense or committed himself in saying that Paine had “no faith in his countrymen, and was even an infidel in his own of every little importance, and the faith all the ever said or did has long passed into the oblivion which overtakes the insignificant in a journalist’s almost inevitable.” The editor of the D. T. may be quite sure that Thomas Paine’s name, and what he did for the French Revolution and the American Declaration of Independence, each more for true religion, will be remembered long after the name of any editor of or proprietor of the D. T. has sunk into “the quiet oblivion of eternity.”