Politics and Religion
Sharpe was a republican and a friend of Thomas Paine and Horne Tooke, and became a member of the "Society for Constitutional Information. As a result of a legal dispute involving Horne Took, Sharp was questioned by the Privy council on charges relating to treason, but was eventually dismissed without punishment as merely an "enthusiast".
He became a convert to the teachings of Mesmer and Swedenborg and came under the religious influence of would-be visionary, Jacob Bryan (who worked for Sharp as a printer for a time), and millennialist prophet Richard Brothers, engraving the latter as "Prince of the Hebrews". After Brothers incarceration in an insane asylum in Islington, Sharp became an adherent of prophetess, Joanna Southcott, whom he brought from Exeter to London and kept at his own expense for a considerable time; he made a portrait drawing if her which he engraved. Despite her apparently premature death he never lost faith in her divine mission or the possibility that she would reappear, and wrote a book in her defense: "An answer to the world etc." (London, 1806).
Read more about this topic: William Sharp (engraver)
Famous quotes containing the words politics and/or religion:
“The average educated man in America has about as much knowledge of what a political idea is as he has of the principles of counterpoint. Each is a thing used in politics or music which those fellows who practise politics or music manipulate somehow. Show him one and he will deny that it is politics at all. It must be corrupt or he will not recognize it. He has only seen dried figs. He has only thought dried thoughts. A live thought or a real idea is against the rules of his mind.”
—John Jay Chapman (1862–1933)
“We seem to be pariahs alike in the visible and the invisible world, with no foothold anywhere, though by every principle of government and religion we should have an equal place on this planet.”
—Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902)