Our collection of articles, records and reviews about Methodists and Thomas Paine.
Although Thomas Paine is best known for his role as a revolutionary, political and social reformer and biblical critic, like many of his circle of friends and acquaintances he had a passionate interest in science, or, as it was then termed, natural philosophy.
Thomas Paine was not by nature a revolutionary; he was a reformer. His early attitude towards both government and religion was benign, and when his early history is finally presented to the public it will at last become apparent that he was originally a conformist.
Thomas Paine: His Decision To Publish The Age Of Reason Read Post »
The Rights of Man won an audience in the 1790’s because the Federalists in power moved away from accommodation towards coercion. Federalists strung the “strings” which Rights of Man could “vibrate”.
Thus the weight of the evidence that we have at the moment suggests quite strongly, if not conclusively, that the “A Forester” articles of 1772-3, as well as those of 1787-9, were written by the Reverend Richard Michell, and that they were not written by Thomas Paine.
The brutal treatment meted out to the ringleaders of the mutiny makes grim reading, and is testimony to the genuine fear among the self—apointed leaders of England at the threat to their wealth and privilege the mutiny posed. Their attitude is reflected among some of today’s political figures.
Paine admired the teachings of Jesus, and he went to great lengths to free them from smothering additions, which had been drawn from the mythology of ancient cults and grafted onto them by the churchmakers who usurped Jesus’s role of teacher.
Paine’s Rights of Man was prosecuted for libel not so much because of its contents but because, rather than confining his audience to ‘the judicious reader’, he had addressed ‘the lowest orders of the people – people who…cannot from their education or situation in ‘life, be supposed to understand the. subject on which he writes.’
![“Reason against unreason” a 1882 illustration by Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann shows the “Light of Reason”, containing bust portraits of “Johannes Kepler, I. Kant, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, B. de Spinoza, Franklin, Voltaire, E.H. Haeckel, Tyndall, Huxley, [and] Darwin”, beaming against a large umbrella labeled “Bigotry, Supernaturalism, [and] Fanaticism” – Library of Congress](https://thomaspaine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Reason-against-unreason.jpg)
Paine appealed to reason, his ultimate cause was a democratic system of society. His spirit stands in glaring contrast to that of the politico-religious dictators who lorded it over most nations when he wrote, and who have their counterparts today in dictators.
