Quakers

An 1820s caricature of Paine being attacked by tiny devils and rat-like creatures, Cobbett carrying a coffin containing Paine’s bones and being attacked by rats and Isaac Hunt holding a reform flag. – Thomas Paine Society UK Bulletin (2010)

The Adventures of Thomas Paine’s Bones

Resources Essays

If we pass from personal relics to relics of personality, those of Paine are innumerable; and among these the most important are the legends and fictions told concerning him by enemies, unconscious that their romances were really tributes to his unique influence.

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The Bread Famine and the Pawnbroker; The Lesueur Brothers (undated) - Meisterdrucke reproductions.

Thomas Paine and the French Revolution

Studies in Thomas Paine

Paine—as an English revolutionary and an actor, witness, and interpreter of the Age of Revolutions—developed a democratic vision during the period of the Convention initiated on 9 Thermidor (1794-1795) that distanced him from both Jacobin formulations and practices, and from legislations and speeches by Thermidorian deputies.

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Providentia

The Mysteries of Paine’s Beliefs in Providence

Studies in Thomas Paine

In Paine’s view, organized religions marketed unreliable hearsay piled on hearsay as “revelations” that are, by definition, based on faith rather than evidence. Carefully observing nature, he rejected nearly everything propounded by organized religions as antithetical to rational analysis, retaining from Biblical accounts only what was discernable through observation.

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A 1968 Prominent Americans Issue 40 cents postage stamp depicts Thomas Paine – National Postal Museum Collection

Discovering the Truth About Thomas Paine

Beacon, Beacon November 2023

I joined the TPNHA because Paine still lives among us, on bookshelves, yes, but moreso here in The Beacon. There are still statues to be cast, a national monument to be built, national school curriculums to be written, and biographical movies to be made. 

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James Nayler, a prominent Quaker leader, being pilloried and whipped -link

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

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2012 Number 2 Volume 11

How dared Thomas Paine, a man whose formal education had ended at thirteen, 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 and a debtor and bankrupt, even dare to think about government?

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world puzzle

BOOK REVIEW: Thomas Paine His Life, His Time and The Birth of Modem Nations

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2007 Number 1 Volume 9

Abraham Lincoln, the father of the modern Republican Party, was converted to deism by reading The Age of Reason. He wrote a pamphlet extolling Paine’s views which his friends tossed into the stove. Even the bumbling third rate movie actor Ronald Reagan could quote Paine.

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vote protest

BOOK REVIEW: Gender, Religion And Radicalism In The Long Eighteenth Century

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2007 Number 4 Volume 8

That century with its agricultural and industrial revolutions, the Wesley and English Methodism, the sciences, the challenge of slavery, the French and American revolutions, Thomas Paine and other enlightened thinkers, but then the loss of the colonies – was not an easy stage on which a woman might make her case.

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world love

Thomas Paine: Observations On Methodism And His Marriage To Mary Lambert 

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2006 Number 3 Volume 8

How much Paine ever learned about his daughter and his estranged wife we will probably never know. Sarah would appear to have conceived about six months after the marriage, and Paine was back in Thetford to commence studying for the Excise about the time his daughter died.

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A 1809 American print titled “Thomas Paine’s Recantation!” or “Thomas Paine’s Last Moments” portraying a fictional scene of Paine on his deathbed seated in a chair with a woman, identified as Mary Roscoe (or Mary Hindsdale), at his side. Paine did not recant his beliefs on his deathbed; the image is propaganda circulated by his political and religious opponents – Library of Congress

`Thou Shalt Not Bear False Witness’ 

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2006 Number 3 Volume 8

The story of Paine’s “conversion” surfaced within days of his death. In fact there has rarely been a critic of Christianity who has not renounced his critical opinions according to writers such as Mr. Samuel, author of works who also trots out the tale of Voltaire having renounced his opinions.

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BOOK REVIEW: Freethinkers, A History Of American Secularism

Thomas Paine Society UK, TPUK 2006 Number 2 Volume 8

Although it may seem an exaggeration I nevertheless feel that books devoted to the history of secularism are sadly as rare as hens teeth, so it was something of a surprise when I read a mention in an American publication about the forthcoming publication of the work under review.

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