Satires and Profanities

Mr. Foote has done an important service to the memory of James Thomson (B.V.) by collecting in book form a number of the articles Thomson contributed to the National Reformer and the Secularist on subjects connected with the popular religion. It is well that those who have learned to admire Thomson as an original and powerful poet should be enabled to study him in his aspect as a practical thinker and publicist; and no competent reader can fail to be strongly impressed by the intellectual quality of these Satires and Profanities. Written in keen, brilliant, nervous English, and alive with the writer’s individuality, they constitute a stringent and memorable protest against the benighted religious thought of the time. Mr. Foote, who introduces them with a short critical and biographical preface, rightly anticipates that Freethinkers will prize the book. They will not only value it on its merits: they will feel it their duty to keep before the world this collection of the strenuous utterances of a man of genius to whom religious unreason was a perpetual offence.
-Our Corner, Vol. 4