A GREAT REBEL

Press, Volume LXXIII, Issue 22081, 1 May 1937, Page 17

A GREAT REBEL

Tom Paine, Friend of Mankind. By Hesketh Pearson. Hamish Hamilton. 318 pp. (9/- net.) Mr Pearson has very well timed his biography of Tom Paine for the bicentenary of Paine's birth, which fell on January 29. Paine does not require much expounding:'his ideas were simple, and expressed with a force that made them—literally— terrible. But he does require, even, now, a.certain amount of rescuing. In- a sense, he has to be rescued I from himself: he impressed himself: on the minds of millions as a leader and liberator, but he impressed himself on millions more, in the modern phrase, as "a menace." He has to be rescued, even now, from the traces of infamy that still cling to his memory, so heavily was he bespattered by official and unofficial traducers. It is a very honest man who is drawn into view, a very brave one, a very energetic one, a man. of unshakable faith in ideas which, ( when he announced them, seemed to express the heart of evil. They! were, simply, the ideas of a republican and a rationalist—but not an atheist. His basic religious positipn was this: "It is a duty incumbent on every true deist, that he vindicates the moral justice of God against the calumnies of the Bible." His republican position was declared in words that struck mercilessly against kings and nobles, privilege, and the subjection of the maintain them. What did Paine do, with these pebbles in his sling? He inspired the American colonists to fight the War of Independence. He was the voice of Republican France in England, and was 'silenced there only by the declaration of war and his own outlawry.' His adventures in France—his sitting as a deputy in Paris, his atterp.pt to save Louis, his escape from the guillotine—are barely credible, yet matters of exact record. And with "The Age of Reason" he shook established eoclesiasticism as he had shaken established property, and privilege with "The Rights of Man." This is the story Mr Pearson tells; and he tells it plainly and vigorously. His comments are on the whole just, and never superfluous. Paine's last words were: "I have lived an honest and useful life to mankind; my time has been spent in doing good; and I die in perfect composure and resignation to the will of my Creator God." Man and acts, as Mr Pearson reveals them, are harmonised with this summary.