Reid's work on London debating societies followed a magistrate's raid in 1798. He gave specifics of seven London societies, five of those meeting in the City of London area. There are few other sources for these clubs. His political tone is described as "alarmist". The work has been called a "hostile caricature" and "indiscriminate attack on both radicals and sectarians".
Influences and perspectives Among Reid's influences was a recent book on French
Jacobinism by the
Abbé Barruel. The work played on fears that the debating societies were breeding grounds for subversion and plotting, and that the "clubbists" who frequented them were potential revolutionaries. Reid referenced the pre-1789 Robin Hood Society. He also claimed that a typical
benefit society meeting might be the occasion for circulation of
The Age of Reason. Adopting
Edmund Burke's doctrine of the negative effects of association, Reid attributed the irreligion and subversion expressed in debating clubs to the thought of
William Godwin,
Tom Paine,
Joseph Priestley,
Jean-Jacques Rousseau and
Voltaire. It was reviewed in the
New Annual Register as a "miscellaneous production", while
The Critical Review noted that Reid's work in its 117 pages included in its net also Methodist preachers and
Swedenborgians, the Whig Club and the LCS. One consequence of Reid's work as an informer, at the Green Dragon in Cripplegate, was that he was able to link
Bannister Truelock, a millenarian Methodist preacher in the LCS, to
James Hadfield, who attempted in 1800 to assassinate the King. Reid's attack on Godwin has been called "dull and vicious", and compared to that of the loyalist
John Bowles. Against Paine's influence, Reid recommended
Richard Watson's
Apology for the Bible. The anti-Methodist polemicist Thomas Ellis Owen cited Reid in his 1801 tract
Hints to Heads of Families.
Reid on the London Corresponding Society Reid gave an account of the expulsions of the booksellers John Bone (a United Englishman) and Richard Lee ("Citizen Lee", a Methodist) from the LCS, on the grounds of their refusal to sell
The Age of Reason and the
Ruins of Empire of the
Comte de Volney.
E. P. Thompson considered accurate at least Reid's description of this phase of the LCS, during which
Francis Place was planning the publication of a cheap edition of
The Age of Reason. This initiative was divisive, and its effect on the LCS was to bring to the surface religious differences. In 1795, Methodists in the LCS had tried, and failed, to purge deists and
atheists. Robert Watson (c.1746–1838), a close associate of
Lord George Gordon, had been excluded from membership, together with hatter Richard Hodgson for supporting the views of Paine. According to Thale, Reid himself broke from the LCS when deism was becoming compulsory for its members. Bone became a founder of the London Reformation Society. Charles Sturt (1763–1812), a Member of Parliament and honorary LCS member, gave a compatible account of Lee's two expulsions from the LCS in a speech in the Commons.
Infidels and enthusiasts Rise and Dissolution purported to trace the connections, dating from the 17th century, between
religious enthusiasm and secular reform organisations. Reid associated Priestley's
rational dissent with the opinions of
David Williams, supporter of the
Octagon Chapel liturgy and "unconditional philosophical liberty". He tended to blur distinctions between reformers, unbelievers, deists and
millenarians, all of whom were accorded a hearing in the Unitarian tradition of unbounded debate. He characterized the "Society of Ancient Deists", who met near
Hoxton in the period 1770 to 1790, as "infidel mystics". Reid also described as dangerous the staid deist and political debating clubs run by Williams. Reid took issue with
evangelicals and their literature, such as the
Evangelical Magazine and its reporting of missionary work. He warned also against the numerous "fanatical preachers" of low backgrounds, such as
Richard Brothers. Commentary in
John Brewster's
Secular Essay of 1802 clarifies that street preachers to whom Reid objected, of
Spa Fields and
Islington, included
Calvinistic Methodists, many of them young men, associated with Lady Anne Agnes Erskine's connexion.
Antinomian theology Reid isolated the concept of
self-sufficiency, at the spiritual level, as the factor connecting religious enthusiasts and rationalist infidels. In this way he linked Samuel How, an
antinomian writer in 1640, with Paine. He linked also Swedenborg's theology with
Muggletonian belief in the antinomian conception of Christ retaining human form in heaven.
Peter Linebaugh and
Marcus Rediker compare
Rise and Dissolution to the heresiological work
Gangraena of 1646. ==Poetry==