The reception which the "Age of Reason" met is its sufficient
justification. The chief priests and preachers answered it with personal
abuse and slander, revealing by such fruits the nature of their tree,
and confessing the feebleness of its root, either in reason or human
affection.
Lucian, in his "[--Greek--]" represents the gods as invisibly present
at a debate, in Athens, on their existence. Damis, who argues from the
evils of the world that there are no gods, is answered by Timocles, a
theological professor with large salary. The gods feel doleful, as the
argument goes against them, until their champion breaks out against
Damis,--"You blasphemous villain, you! Wretch! Accursed monster!" The
chief of the gods takes courage, and exclaims: "Well done, Timocles!
give him hard words. That is your strong point. Begin, to reason and you
will be dumb as a fish."
So was it in the age when the Twilight of the Gods was brought on by
faith in the Son of Man. Not very different was it when this Son of
Man, dehumanized by despotism, made to wield the thunderbolts of Jove,
reached in turn his inevitable Twilight. The man who pointed out the
now admitted survivals of Paganism in the despotic system then called
Christianity, who said, "the church has set up a religion of pomp and
revenue in the pretended imitation of a person whose life was
humility and poverty," was denounced as a sot and an adulterer. These
accusations, proved in this work unquestionably false, have accumulated
for generations, so that a mountain of prejudice must be tunnelled
before any reader can approach the "Age of Reason" as the work of an
honest and devout mind.
It is only to irrelevant personalities that allusion is here made. Paine
was vehement in his arraignment of Church and Priesthood, and it was
fair enough for them to strike back with animadversions on Deism and
Infidelity. But it was no answer to an argument against the antiquity of
Genesis to call Paine a drunkard, had it been true. This kind of reply
was heard chiefly in America. In England it was easy for Paine's chief
antagonist, the Bishop of Llandaff, to rebuke Paine's strong language,
when his lordship could sit serenely in the House of Peers with
knowledge that his opponent was answered with handcuffs for every
Englishman who sold his book. But in America, slander had to take the
place of handcuffs.
Paine is at times too harsh and militant. But in no case does he attack
any person's character. Nor is there anything in his language, wherever
objectionable, which I have heard censured when uttered on the side of
orthodoxy. It is easily forgotten that Luther desired the execution of
a rationalist, and that Calvin did burn a Socinian. The furious language
of Protestants against Rome, and of Presbyterians against the English
Church, is considered even heroic, like the invective ascribed to
Christ, "Generation of vipers, how can you escape the damnation of
hell!" Although vehement language grates on the ear of an age that
understands the real forces of evolution, the historic sense remembers
that moral revolutions have been made with words hard as cannon-balls.
It was only when soft phrases about the evil of slavery, which
"would pass away in God's good time," made way for the abolitionist
denunciation of the Constitution as "an agreement with hell," that the
fortress began to fall. In other words, reforms are wrought by those who
are in earnest.* It is difficult in our time to place one's self in
the situation of a heretic of Paine's time. Darwin, who is buried
in Westminster, remembered the imprisonment of some educated men for
opinions far less heretical than his own. George III. egoistic insanity
appears (1892) to have been inherited by an imperial descendant, and
should Germans be presently punished for their religion, as Paine's
early followers were in England, we shall again hear those words that
are the "half-battles" preceding victories.
* "In writing upon this, as upon every other subject, I
speak a language plain and intelligible. I deal not in hints
and intimations. I have several reasons for this: first,
that I may be clearly understood; secondly, that it may be
seen I am in earnest; and thirdly, because it is an affront
to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance."--Paine's
reply to Bishop Watson.
There is even greater difficulty in the appreciation by one generation
of the inner sense of the language of a past one. The common notion
that Paines "Age of Reason" abounds in "vulgarity" is due to the lack
of literary culture in those--probably few--who have derived that
impression from its perusal. It is the fate of all genius potent enough
to survive a century that its language will here and there seem coarse.
The thoughts of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Shakespeare,--whose works are
commonly expurgated,--are so modern that they are not generally granted
the allowances conceded to writers whose ideas are as antiquated as
their words. Only the instructed minds can set their classic nudities in
the historic perspective that reveals their innocency and value. Paine's
book has done as much to modify human belief as any ever written. It is
one of the very few religious works of the last century which survives
in unsectarian circulation. It requires a scholarly perception to
recognize in its occasional expressions, by some called "coarse," the
simple Saxon of Nor-folkshire. Similar expressions abound in pious
books of the time; they are not censured, because they are not read. His
refined contemporary antagonists--Dr. Watson and Dr. Priestley--found no
fault with Paine's words, though the former twice accuses his assertions
as "indecent." In both cases, however, Paine is pointing out some
biblical triviality or indecency--or what he conceived such. I have
before me original editions of both Parts of the "Age of Reason" printed
from Paine's manuscripts. Part First may be read by the most prudish
parent to a daughter, without an omission. In Part Second six or seven
sentences might be omitted by the parent, where the writer deals,
without the least prurience, with biblical narratives that can hardly be
daintily touched. Paine would have been astounded at the suggestion of
any impropriety in his expressions. He passes over four-fifths of the
passages in the Bible whose grossness he might have cited in support of
his objection to its immorality. "Obscenity," he says, "in matters of
faith, however wrapped up, is always a token of fable and imposture; for
it is necessary to our serious belief in God that we do not connect it
with stories that run, as this does, into ludicrous interpretations. The
story [of the miraculous conception] is, upon the face of it, the same
kind of story as that of Jupiter and Leda."
* "An Apology for the Bible. By R. Llandaff" [Dr.
Richard Watson].
Another fostered prejudice supposes "The Age of Reason" largely made up
of scoffs. The Bishop of Llandaff, in his reply to Paine, was impressed
by the elevated Theism of the work, to portions of which he ascribed
"a philosophical sublimity." Watson apparently tried to constrain
his ecclesiastical position into English fair play, so that his actual
failures to do so were especially misleading, as many knew Paine only as
represented by this eminent antagonist. For instance, the Bishop says,
"Moses you term a coxcomb, etc." But Paine, commenting on Numbers xii.,
3, "Moses was very meek, above all men," had argued that Moses could
not have written the book, for "If Moses said this of himself he was a
coxcomb." Again the Bishop says Paine terms Paul "a fool." But Paine had
quoted from Paul, "'Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened
except it die.' To which [he says] one might reply in his own language,
and say, 'Thou fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened
except it die not.'"
No intellect that knows the law of literature, that deep answers only
unto deep, can suppose that the effect of Paine's "Age of Reason," on
which book the thirty years' war for religious freedom in England was
won, after many martyrdoms, came from a scoffing or scurrilous work. It
is never Paine's object to raise a laugh; if he does so it is because
of the miserable baldness of the dogmas, and the ignorant literalism,
consecrated in the popular mind of his time. Through page after page he
peruses the Heavens, to him silently declaring the glory of God, and it
is not laughter but awe when he asks, "From whence then could arise the
solitary and strange conceit, that the Almighty, who had millions of
worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all
the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and
one woman had eaten an apple!"
In another work Paine finds allegorical truth in the legend of Eden. The
comparative mythlogists of to-day, with many sacred books of the East,
can find mystical meaning and beauty in many legends of the Bible
wherein Paine could see none, but it is because of their liberation by
the rebels of last century from bondage to the pettiness of literalism.
Paine sometimes exposes an absurdity with a taste easily questionable by
a generation not required like his own to take such things under foot
of the letter. But his spirit is never flippant, and the sentences that
might so seem to a casual reader are such as Browning defended in his
"Christmas Eve."
"If any blames me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
The topics I dwell on, were unlawful--
Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity,
On the bounds of the Holy and the awful,
I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,
And refer myself to Thee, instead of him;
Who head and heart alike discernest,
Looking below light speech we utter,
When the frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest!"
Even Dr. James Martineau, whose reverential spirit no one can question,
once raised a smile in his audience, of which the present writer was
one, by saying that the account of the temptation of Jesus, if true,
must have been reported by himself, or "by the only other party
present." Any allusion to the devil in our day excites a smile. But it
was not so in Paine's day, when many crossed themselves while speaking
of this dark prince. Paine has "too much respect for the moral character
of Christ" to suppose that he told the story of the devil showing him
all the kingdoms of the world. "How happened it that he did not discover
America; or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any
interest?" This is not flippancy; it was by following the inkstand
Luther threw at the devil with equally vigorous humor that the grotesque
figure was eliminated, leaving the reader of to-day free to appreciate
the profound significance of the Temptation.
How free Paine is from any disposition to play to pit or gallery, any
more than to dress circle, is shown in his treatment of the Book of
Jonah. It is not easy to tell the story without exciting laughter;
indeed the proverbial phrases for exaggeration,--"a whale," a "fish
story,"--probably came from Jonah. Paine's smile is slight. He says,
"it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had
swallowed the whale"; but this is merely in passing to an argument that
miracles, in the early world, would hardly have represented Divinity.
Had the fish cast up Jonah in the streets of Nineveh the people would
probably have been affrighted, and fancied them both devils. But in the
second Part of the work there is a very impressive treatment of the Book
of Jonah. This too is introduced with a passing smile--"if credulity
could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything." But it
is precisely to this supposed "scoffer" that we owe the first
interpretation of the profound and pathetic significance of the book,
lost sight of in controversies about its miracle. Paine anticipates Baur
in pronouncing it a poetical work of Gentile origin. He finds in it the
same lesson against intolerance contained in the story of the reproof of
Abraham for piously driving the suffering fire-worshipper from his tent.
(This story is told by the Persian Saadi, who also refers to Jonah: "And
now the whale swallowed Jonah: the sun set.") In the prophet mourning
for his withered gourd, while desiring the destruction of a city, Paine
finds a satire; in the divine rebuke he hears the voice of a true
God, and one very different from the deity to whom the Jews ascribed
massacres. The same critical acumen is shown in his treatment of the
Book of Job, which he believes to be also of Gentile origin, and much
admires.
The large Paine Mythology cleared aside, he who would learn the
truth about this religious teacher will find in his way a misleading
literature of uncritical eulogies. Indeed the pious prejudices against
Paine have largely disappeared, as one may see by comparing the earlier
with the later notices of him in religious encyclopaedias. But though he
is no longer placed in an infernal triad as in the old hymn--"The world,
the devil, and Tom Paine"--and his political services are now candidly
recognized, he is still regarded as the propagandist of a bald
illiterate deism. This, which is absurdly unhistorical, Paine having
been dealt with by eminent critics of his time as an influence among the
educated, is a sequel to his long persecution. For he was relegated to
the guardianship of an unlearned and undiscriminating radicalism, little
able to appreciate the niceties of his definitions, and was gilded by
its defensive commonplaces into a figurehead. Paine therefore has now
to be saved from his friends more perhaps than from his enemies. It has
been shown on a former page that his governmental theories were of a
type peculiar in his time. Though such writers as Spencer, Frederic
Harrison, Bagehot, and Dicey have familiarized us with his ideas, few of
them have the historic perception which enables Sir George Trevelyan
to recognize Paine's connection with them. It must now be added that
Paine's religion was of a still more peculiar type. He cannot be classed
with deists of the past or theists of the present. Instead of being
the mere iconoclast, the militant assailant of Christian beliefs, the
"infidel" of pious slang, which even men who should know better suppose,
he was an exact thinker, a slow and careful writer, and his religious
ideas, developed through long years, require and repay study.
The dedication of "The Age of Reason" places the work under the
"protection" of its authors fellow-citizens of the United States. To-day
the trust comes to many who really are such as Paine supposed all of his
countrymen to be,--just and independent lovers of truth and right.
We shall see that his trust was not left altogether unfulfilled by
a multitude of his contemporaries, though they did not venture to do
justice to the man. Paine had idealized his countrymen, looking from
his prison across three thousand miles. But, to that vista of space, a
century of time had to be added before the book which fanatical Couthon
suppressed, and the man whom murderous Barrere sentenced to death, could
both be fairly judged by educated America.
"The Age of Reason" is in two Parts, published in successive years.
These divisions are interesting as memorials of the circumstances
under which they were written and published,--in both cases with death
evidently at hand. But taking the two Parts as one work, there appears
to my own mind a more real division: a part written by Paine's century,
and another originating from himself. Each of these has an important and
traceable evolution.
I. The first of these divisions may be considered, fundementally, as
a continuation of the old revolution against arbitrary authority.
Carlyle's humor covers a profound insight when he remarks that Paine,
having freed America with his "Common Sense," was resolved to free this
whole world, and perhaps the other! All the authorities were and are
interdependent. "If thou release this man thou art not Caesar's friend,"
cried the Priest to Pilate. The proconsul must face the fact that in
Judea Caesarism rests on the same foundation with Jahvism. Authority
leans on authority; none can stand alone. It is still a question whether
political revolutions cause or are caused by religious revolutions.
Buckle maintained that the French Revolution was chiefly due to the
previous overthrow of spiritual authority; Rocquain, that the political
_regime_ was shaken before the philosophers arose.* In England religious
changes seem to have usually followed those of a political character,
not only in order of time, but in character. In beginning the "Age of
Reason," Paine says:
* Felix Rocquain's fine work, L'Esprit revolutionnaire
avant la Revolution," though not speculative, illustrates
the practical nature of revolution,--an uncivilized and
often retrograde form of evolution.
"Soon after I had published the pamphlet 'Common Sense' in America I saw
the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government
would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The
adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it had taken place,
whether Jewish, Christian, or Turkish, had so effectually prohibited by
pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon
first principles of religion, that until the system of government should
be changed those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before
the world; but that whenever this should be done a revolution in the
system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft
would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed, and
unadulterated belief of one God and no more."
The historical continuity of the critical negations of Paine with the
past is represented in his title. The Revolution of 1688,--the secular
arm transferring the throne from one family to another,--brought the
monarchical superstition into doubt; straightway the Christian authority
was shaken.
One hundred years before Paine's book, appeared Charles Blount's
"Oracles of Reason." Macaulay describes Blount as the head of a small
school of "infidels," troubled with a desire to make converts; his
delight was to worry the priests by asking them how light existed before
the sun was made, and where Eve found thread to stitch her fig-leaves.
But to this same Blount, Macaulay is constrained to attribute
emancipation of the press in England.
Blount's title was taken up in America by Ethan Allen, leader of the
"Green Mountain Boys." Allen's "Oracles of Reason" is forgotten; he is
remembered by his demand (1775) for the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga,
"in the name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The last five
words of this famous demand would have been a better title for the
book. It introduces the nation to a Jehovah qualified by the
Continental Congress. Ethan Allen's deity is no longer a King of kings:
arbitrariness has disappeared; men are summoned to belief in a governor
administering laws inherent in the constitution of a universe co-eternal
with himself, and with which he is interdependent. His administration
is not for any divine glory, but, in anticipation of our constitutional
preamble, to "promote the general welfare." The old Puritan alteration
in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Commonwealth come!" would in Allen's church
have been "Thy Republic come!" That is, had he admitted prayer, which
to an Executive is of course out of place. It must not, however, be
supposed that Ethan Allen is conscious that his system is inspired
by the Revolution. His book is a calm, philosophical analysis of New
England theology and metaphysics; an attempt to clear away the ancient
biblical science and set Newtonian science in its place; to found what
he conceives "Natural Religion."
In editing his "Account of Arnold's Campaign in Quebec," John Joseph
Henry says in a footnote that Paine borrowed from Allen. But the aged
man was, in his horror of Paine's religion, betrayed by his memory. The
only connection between the books runs above the consciousness of either
writer. There was necessarily some resemblance between negations dealing
with the same narratives, but a careful comparison of the books leaves
me doubtful whether Paine ever read Allen. His title may have been
suggested by Blount, whose "Oracles of Reason" was in the library of
his assistant at Bor-dentown, John Hall. The works are distinct in aim,
products of different religious climes. Allen is occupied mainly with
the metaphysical, Paine with quite other, aspects of their common
subject. There is indeed a conscientious originality in the freethinkers
who successively availed themselves of the era of liberty secured by
Blount. Collins, Bolingbroke, Hume, Toland, Chubb, Woolston, Tindal,
Middleton, Annet, Gibbon,--each made an examination for himself, and
represents a distinct chapter in the religious history of England.
Annet's "Free Inquirer," aimed at enlightenment of the lower classes,
proved that free thought was tolerated only as an aristocratic
privilege; the author was pilloried, just thirty years before the
cheapening of the "Rights of Man" led to Paine's prosecution. Probably
Morgan did more than any of the deists to prepare English ground for
Paine's sowing, by severely criticising the Bible by a standard
of civilized ethics, so far as ethics were civilized in the early
eighteenth century. But none of these writers touched the deep chord of
religious feeling in, the people. The English-speaking people were timid
about venturing too much on questions which divided the learned, and
were content to express their protest against the worldliness of the
Church and faithlessness to the lowly Saviour, by following pietists and
enthusiasts. The learned clergy, generally of the wealthy classes, were
largely deistical, but conservative. They gradually perceived that the
political and the theological authority rested on the same foundation.
So between the deists and the Christians there was, as Leslie Stephen
says, a "comfortable compromise, which held together till Wesley from
one side, and Thomas Paine from another, forced more serious thoughts on
the age."*
* "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century."
While "The Age of Reason" is thus, in one aspect, the product of its
time, the renewal of an old siege--begun far back indeed as Celsus,--its
intellectual originality is none the less remarkable. Paine is
more complete master of the comparative method than Tindal in his
"Christianity as old as the Creation." In his studies of "Christian
Mythology" (his phrase), one is surprised by anticipations of Baur
and Strauss. These are all the more striking by reason of his
homely illustrations. Thus, in discussing the liabilities of ancient
manuscripts to manipulation, he mentions in his second Part that in the
first, printed less than two years before, there was already a sentence
he never wrote; and contrasts this with the book of nature wherein
no blade of grass can be imitated or altered.* He distinguishes the
historical Jesus from the mythical Christ with nicety, though none had
previously done this. He is more discriminating than the early deists
in his explanations of the scriptural marvels which he discredits. There
was not the invariable alternative of imposture with which the orthodoxy
of his time had been accustomed to deal. He does indeed suspect Moses
with his rod of conjuring, and thinks no better of those who pretended
knowledge of future events; but the incredible narratives are
traditions, fables, and occasionally "downright lies."
* The sentence imported into Paine's Part First is: "The
book of Luke was carried by one voice only." I find the
words added as a footnote in the Philadelphia edition, 1794,
p. 33. While Paine in Paris was utilizing the ascent of the
footnote to his text, Dr. Priestley in Pennsylvania was
using it to show Paine's untrustworthiness. ("Letters to a
Philosophical Unbeliever," p. 73.) But it would appear,
though neither discovered it, that Paine's critic was the
real offender. In quoting the page, before answering it,
Priestley incorporated in the text the footnote of an
American editor. Priestley could not of course imagine such
editorial folly, but all the same the reader may here see
the myth-insect already building the Paine Mythology.
"It is not difficult to discover the progress by which even simple
supposition, with the aid of credulity, will in time grow into a lie,
and at last be told as a fact; and wherever we can find a charitable
reason for a thing of this kind we ought not to indulge a severe one."
Paine's use of the word "lies" in this connection is an archaism.
Carlyle told me that his father always spoke of such tales as "The
Arabian Nights" as "downright lies"; by which he no doubt meant fables
without any indication of being such, and without any moral. Elsewhere
Paine uses "lie" as synonymous with "fabulous"; when he means by the
word what it would now imply, "wilful" is prefixed. In the Gospels he
finds "inventions" of Christian Mythologists--tales founded on
vague rumors, relics of primitive works of imagination mistaken for
history,--fathered upon disciples who did not write them.
His treatment of the narrative of Christ's resurrection may be selected
as an example of his method. He rejects Paul's testimony, and his five
hundred witnesses to Christ's reappearance, because the evidence did not
convince Paul himself, until he was struck by lightning, or otherwise
converted. He finds disagreements in the narratives of the gospels,
concerning the resurrection, which, while proving there was no concerted
imposture, show that the accounts were not written by witnesses of the
events; for in this case they would agree more nearly. He finds in the
narratives of Christ's reappearances,--"suddenly coming in and going out
when doors are shut, vanishing out of sight and appearing again,"--and
the lack of details, as to his dress, etc., the familiar signs of a
ghost-story, which is apt to be told in different ways. "Stories of this
kind had been told of the assassination of Julius Caesar, not many years
before, and they generally have their origin in violent deaths, or in
the execution of innocent persons. In cases of this kind compassion
lends its aid, and benevolently stretches the story. It goes on a little
and a little further, till it becomes a most certain truth. Once start
a ghost, and credulity fills up its life and assigns the cause of its
appearance." The moral and religious importance of the resurrection
would thus be an afterthought. The secrecy and privacy of the alleged
appearances of Christ after death are, he remarks, repugnant to the
supposed end of convincing the world.*
* In 1778 Lessing set forth his "New Hypothesis of the
Evangelists," that they had independently built on a basis
derived from some earlier Gospel of the Hebrews,--a theory
now confirmed by the recovered fragments of that lost
Memoir, collected by Dr. Nicholson of the Bodleian Library.
It is tolerably certain that Paine was unacquainted with
Lessing's work, when he became convinced, by variations in
the accounts of the resurrection, that some earlier
narrative "became afterwards the foundation of the four
books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,"--these
being, traditionally eye-witnesses.
Paine admits the power of the deity to make a revelation. He therefore
deals with each of the more notable miracles on its own evidence,
adhering to his plan of bringing the Bible to judge the Bible. Such an
investigation, written with lucid style and quaint illustration, without
one timid or uncandid sentence, coming from a man whose services and
sacrifices for humanity were great, could not have failed to give the
"Age of Reason" long life, even had these been its only qualities. Four
years before the book appeared, Burke said in Parliament: "Who, born
within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and
Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and the whole race who call
themselves freethinkers?" Paine was, in one sense, of this intellectual
pedigree; and had his book been only a digest and expansion of previous
negative criticisms, and a more thorough restatement of theism, these
could have given it but a somewhat longer life; the "Age of Reason" must
have swelled Burke's list of forgotten freethinking books. But there was
an immortal soul in Paine's book. It is to the consideration of this its
unique life, which has defied the darts of criticism for a century, and
survived its own faults and limitations, that we now turn.
II. Paine's book is the uprising of the human heart against the
Religion of Inhumanity.
This assertion may be met with a chorus of denials that there was, or
is, in Christendom any Religion of Inhumanity. And, if Thomas Paine is
enjoying the existence for which he hoped, no heavenly anthem would
be such music in his ears as a chorus of stormiest denials from earth
reporting that the Religion of Inhumanity is so extinct as to be
incredible. Nevertheless, the Religion of Inhumanity did exist, and
it defended against Paine a god of battles, of pomp, of wrath; an
instigator of race hatreds and exterminations; an establisher of
slavery; a commander of massacres in punishment of theological beliefs;
a sender of lying spirits to deceive men, and of destroying angels to
afflict them with plagues; a creator of millions of human beings under
a certainty of their eternal torture by devils and fires of his own
creation. This apotheosis of Inhumanity is here called a religion,
because it managed to survive from the ages of savagery by violence of
superstition, to gain a throne in the Bible by killing off all who did
not accept its authority to the letter, and because it was represented
by actual inhumanities. The great obstruction of Science and
Civilization was that the Bible was quoted in sanction of war, crusades
against alien religions, murders for witchcraft, divine right of
despots, degradation of reason, exaltation of credulity, punishment of
opinion and unbiblical discovery, contempt of human virtues and human
nature, and costly ceremonies before an invisible majesty, which,
exacted from the means of the people, were virtually the offering of
human sacrifices.
There had been murmurs against this consecrated Inhumanity through the
ages, dissentients here and there; but the Revolution began with Paine.
Nor was this accidental. He was just the one man in the world who had
undergone the training necessary for this particular work.
The higher clergy, occupied with the old textual controversy, proudly
instructing Paine in Hebrew or Greek idioms, little realized their
ignorance in the matter now at issue. Their ignorance had been too
carefully educated to even imagine the University in which words are
things, and things the word, and the many graduations passed between
Thetford Quaker meeting and the French Convention. What to scholastics,
for whom humanities meant ancient classics, were the murders and
massacres of primitive tribes, declared to be the word and work of God?
Words, mere words. They never saw these things. But Paine had seen that
war-god at his work. In childhood he had seen the hosts of the Defender
of the Faith as, dripping with the blood of Culloden and Inverness, they
marched through Thetford; in manhood he had seen the desolations wrought
"by the grace of" that deity to the royal invader of America; he
had seen the massacres ascribed to Jahve repeated in France, while
Robespierre and Couthon were establishing worship of an infra-human
deity. By sorrow, poverty, wrong, through long years, amid revolutions
and death-agonies, the stay-maker's needle had been forged into a pen of
lightning. No Oxonian conductor could avert that stroke, which was
not at mere irrationalities, but at a huge idol worshipped with human
sacrifices. The creation of the heart of Paine, historically traceable,
is so wonderful, its outcome seems so supernatural, that in earlier ages
he might have been invested with fable, like some Avatar. Of some such
man, no doubt, the Hindu poets dreamed in their picture of young Arguna
(in the _Bhagavatgita_). The warrior, borne to the battlefield in his
chariot, finds arrayed against him his kinsmen, friends, preceptors.
He bids his charioteer pause; he cannot fight those he loves. His
charioteer turns: 't is the radiant face of divine Chrishna, his
Saviour! Even He has led him to this grievous contention with kinsmen,
and those to whose welfare he was devoted. Chrishna instructs his
disciple that the war is an illusion; it is the conflict by which,
from age to age, the divine life in the world is preserved. "This
imperishable devotion I declared to the sun, the sun delivered it to
Manu, Manu to Ikshaku; handed down from one to another it was studied by
the royal sages. In the lapse of time that devotion was lost. It is even
the same discipline which I this day communicate to thee, for thou
art my servant and my friend. Both thou and I have passed through many
births. Mine are known to me; thou knowest not of thine. I am made
evident by my own power: as often as there is a decline of virtue, and
an insurrection of wrong and injustice in the world, I appear."
Paine could not indeed know his former births; and, indeed, each former
self of his--Wycliffe, Fox, Roger Williams--was sectarianized beyond
recognition. He could hardly see kinsmen in the Unitarians, who were
especially eager to disown the heretic affiliated on them by opponents;
nor in the Wesleyans, though in him was the blood of their apostle, who
declared salvation a present life, free to all. In a profounder sense,
Paine was George Fox. Here was George Fox disowned, freed from his
accidents, naturalized in the earth and humanized in the world of men.
Paine is explicable only by the intensity of his Quakerism, consuming
its own traditions as once the church's ceremonies and sacraments. On
him, in Thetford meeting-house, rolled the burden of that Light that
enlighteneth every man, effacing distinctions of rank, race, sex, making
all equal, clearing away privilege, whether of priest or mediator,
subjecting all scriptures to its immediate illumination.
This faith was a fearful heritage to carry, even in childhood, away from
the Quaker environment which, by mixture with modifying "survivals," in
habit and doctrine, cooled the fiery gospel for the average tongue.
The intermarriage of Paine's father with a family in the English Church
brought the precocious boy's Light into early conflict with his kindred,
his little lamp being still fed in the meeting-house. A child brought up
without respect for the conventional symbols of religion, or even with
pious antipathy to them, is as if born with only one spiritual skin; he
will bleed at a touch.
"I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, hearing
a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the
Church, upon the subject of what is called _redemption by the death of
the Son of God_. After the sermon was ended I went into the garden,
and as I was going down the garden steps, (for I perfectly remember the
spot), I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought
to myself that it was making God Almighty act like a passionate man,
that killed his son when he could not revenge himself in any other way;
and, as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could
not see for what purpose they preached such sermons. This was not one of
that kind of thoughts that had anything in it of childish levity; it was
to me a serious reflection, arising from the idea I had, that God was
too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under any
necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner at this moment; and
I moreover believe that any system of religion that has anything in it
which shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."
The child took his misgivings out into the garden; he would not by a
denial shock his aunt Cocke's faith as his own had been shocked. For
many years he remained silent in his inner garden, nor ever was drawn
out of it until he found the abstract dogma of the death of God's Son an
altar for sacrificing men, whom he reverenced as all God's sons. What he
used to preach at Dover and Sandwich cannot now be known. His ignorance
of Greek and Latin, the scholastic "humanities," had prevented his
becoming a clergyman, and introduced him to humanities of another kind.
His mission was then among the poor and ignorant.*
* "Old John Berry, the late Col. Hay's servant, told me he
knew Paine very well when he was at Dover--had heard him
preach there--thought him a staymaker by trade."--W. Weedon,
of Glynde, quoted in Notes and Queries (London), December
29, 1866.
Sixteen years later he is in Philadelphia, attending the English Church,
in which he had been confirmed. There were many deists in that Church,
whose laws then as now were sufficiently liberal to include them. In his
"Common Sense" (published January 10, 1776) Paine used the reproof of
Israel (I. Samuel) for desiring a King. John Adams, a Unitarian and
monarchist, asked him if he really believed in the inspiration of the
Old Testament. Paine said he did not, and intended at a later period to
publish his opinions on the subject. There was nothing inconsistent in
Paine's believing that a passage confirmed by his own Light was a
divine direction, though contained in a book whose alleged inspiration
throughout he did not accept. Such was the Quaker principle. Before
that, soon after his arrival in the country, when he found African
Slavery supported by the Old Testament, Paine had repudiated the
authority of that book; he declares it abolished by "Gospel light,"
which includes man-stealing among the greatest crimes. When, a year
later, on the eve of the Revolution, he writes "Common Sense," he has
another word to say about religion, and it is strictly what the human
need of the hour demands. Whatever his disbeliefs, he could never
sacrifice human welfare to them, any more than he would, suffer dogmas
to sacrifice the same. It would have been a grievous sacrifice of the
great cause of republican independence, consequently, of religious
liberty, had he introduced a theological controversy at the moment
when it was of vital importance that the sects should rise above their
partition-walls and unite for a great common end. The Quakers, deistical
as they were, preserved religiously the separatism once compulsory; and
Paine proved himself the truest Friend among them when he was "moved"
by the Spirit of Humanity, for him at length the Holy Spirit, to utter
(1776) his brave cheer for Catholicity.
"As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all
governments to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know
of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man
throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle,
which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and
he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the
companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself,
I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty
that there should be a diversity of religious opinions amongst us: it
affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of
one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter
for probation; and, on this liberal principle, I look on the various
denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing
only in what is called their Christian names."
There was no pedantry whatever about Paine, this obedient son of
Humanity. He would defend Man against men, against sects and parties;
he would never quarrel about the botanical label of a tree bearing such
fruits as the Declaration of Independence. But no man better knew the
power of words, and that a botanical error may sometimes result in
destructive treatment of the tree. For this reason he censured the
Quakers for opposing the Revolution on the ground that, in the words
of their testimony (1776), "the setting up and putting down kings and
governments is God's peculiar prerogative." Kings, he answers, are not
removed by miracles, but by just such means as the Americans were using.
"Oliver Cromwell thanks you. Charles, then, died not by the hands of
man; and should the present proud imitator of him come to the same
untimely end, the writers and publishers of the Testimony are bound, by
the doctrine it contains, to applaud the fact."
He was then a Christian. In his "Epistle to Quakers" he speaks of the
dispersion of the Jews as "foretold by our Saviour." In his famous first
_Crisis_ he exhorts the Americans not to throw "the burden of the day
upon Providence, but 'show your faith by your works,' that God may bless
you." For in those days there was visible to such eyes as his, as to
anti-slavery eyes in our civil war,
"A fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel."
The Republic, not American but Human, became Paine's religion. "Divine
Providence intends this country to be the asylum of persecuted
virtue from every quarter of the globe." So he had written before the
Declaration of Independence. In 1778 he finds that there still survives
some obstructive superstition among English churchmen in America about
the connection of Protestant Christianity with the King. In his seventh
_Crisis_(November 21, 1778) he wrote sentences inspired by his new
conception of religion.
"In a Christian and philosophical sense, mankind seem to have stood
still at individual civilization, and to retain as nations all the
original rudeness of nature.... As individuals we profess ourselves
Christians, but as nations we are heathens, Romans, and what not. I
remember the late Admiral Saunders declaring in the House of Commons,
and that in the time of peace, 'That the city of Madrid laid in ashes
was not a sufficient atonement for the Spaniards taking off the rudder
of an English sloop of war.'... The arm of Britain has been spoken of as
the arm of the Almighty, and she has lived of late as if she thought
the whole world created for her diversion. Her politics, instead
of civilizing, has tended to brutalize mankind, and under the vain
unmeaning title of 'Defender of the Faith,' she has made war like an
Indian on the Religion of Humanity."'
Thus, forty years before Auguste Comte sat, a youth of twenty, at the
feet of Saint Simon, learning the principles now known as "The Religion
of Humanity,"* Thomas Paine had not only minted the name, but with it
the idea of international civilization, in which nations are to treat
each other as gentlemen in private life. National honor was, he said,
confused with "bullying"; but "that which is the best character for an
individual is the best character for a nation." The great and pregnant
idea was, as in the previous instances, occasional. It was a sentence
passed upon the "Defender-of-the-Faith" superstition, which detached
faith from humanity, and had pressed the Indian's tomahawk into the
hands of Jesus.
* Mr. Thaddeus B. Wakeman, an eminent representative of the
"Religion of Humanity," writes me that he has not found this
phrase in any work earlier than Paine's _Crisis_, vii.
At the close of the American Revolution there appeared little need for
a religious reformation. The people were happy, prosperous, and, there
being no favoritism toward any sect under the new state constitutions,
but perfect equality and freedom, the Religion of Humanity meant
sheathing of controversial swords also. It summoned every man to lend a
hand in repairing the damages of war, and building the new nationality.
Paine therefore set about constructing his iron bridge of thirteen
symbolic ribs, to overleap the ice-floods and quicksands of rivers. His
assistant in this work, at Bordentown, New Jersey, John Hall, gives us
in his journal, glimpses of the religious ignorance and fanaticism of
that region. But Paine showed no aggressive spirit towards them. "My
employer," writes Hall (1786), "has _Common Sense_ enough to disbelieve
most of the common systematic theories of Divinity, but does not seem
to establish any for himself." In all of his intercourse with Hall (a
Unitarian just from England), and his neighbors, there is no trace
of any disposition to deprive any one of a belief, or to excite any
controversy. Humanity did not demand it, and by that direction he left
the people to their weekly toils and Sunday sermons.
But when (1787) he was in England, Humanity gave another command. It was
obeyed in the eloquent pages on religious liberty and equality in "The
Rights of Man." Burke had alarmed the nation by pointing out that the
Revolution in France had laid its hand on religion. The cry was raised
that religion was in danger. Paine then uttered his impressive paradox:
"Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but the counterfeit
of it. Both are despotisms. The one assumes the right of withholding
liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope
armed with fire and faggot, the other is the pope selling or granting
indulgences.... Toleration by the same assumed authority by which it
tolerates a man to pay his worship, presumptuously and blasphemously
sets itself up to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.... Who then art
thou, vain dust and ashes, by whatever name thou art called, whether a
king, a bishop, a church or a state, a parliament or anything else, that
obtrudest thine insignificance between the soul of man and his maker?
Mind thine own concerns. If he believes not as thou believest, it is a
proof that thou believest not as he believeth, and there is no earthly
power can determine between you.... Religion, without regard to names,
as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the divine
object of all adoration, is man bringing to his maker the fruits of his
heart; and though these fruits may differ like the fruits of the earth,
the grateful tribute of every one is accepted."
This, which I condense with reluctance, was the affirmation which the
Religion of Humanity needed in England. But when he came to sit in the
French Convention a new burden rolled upon him. There was Marat with the
Bible always before him, picking out texts that justified his murders;
there were Robespierre and Couthon invoking the God of Nature to
sanction just such massacres as Marat found in his Bible; and there were
crude "atheists" consecrating the ferocities of nature more dangerously
than if they had named them Siva, Typhon, or Satan. Paine had published
the rights of man for men; but here human hearts and minds had been
buried under the superstitions of ages. The great mischief had ensued,
to use his own words, "by the possession of power before they understood
principles: they earned liberty in words but not in fact" Exhumed
suddenly, as if from some Nineveh, resuscitated into semi-conscious
strength, they remembered only the methods of the allied inquisitors and
tyrants they were overthrowing; they knew no justice but vengeance; and
when on crumbled idols they raised forms called "Nature" and "Reason,"
old idols gained life in the new forms. These were the gods which had
but too literally created, by the slow evolutionary force of human
sacrifices, the new revolutionary priesthood. Their massacres could not
be questioned by those who acknowledged the divine hand in the slaughter
of Canaanites.*
* On August 10, 1793, there was a sort of communion of the
Convention around the statue of Nature, whose breasts were
fountains of water. Herault de Sechelles, at that time
president, addressed the statue: "Sovereign of the savage
and of the enlightened nations, O Nature, this great people,
gathered at the first beam of day before thee, is free! It
is in thy bosom, it is in thy sacred sources, that it has
recovered its rights, that it has regenerated itself after
traversing so many ages of error and servitude: it must
return to the simplicity of thy ways to rediscover liberty
and equality. O Nature! receive the expression of the
eternal attachment of the French people for thy laws; and
may the teeming waters gushing from thy breasts, may this
pure beverage which refreshed the first human beings,
consecrate in this Cup of Fraternity and Equality the vows
that France makes thee this day,--the most beautiful that
the sun has illumined since it was suspended in the
immensity of space." The cup passed around from lip to lip,
amid fervent ejaculations. Next year Nature's breasts
issued Herault's blood.
The Religion of Humanity again issued its command to its minister. The
"Age of Reason" was written, in its first form, and printed in French.
"Couthon," says Lanthenas, "to whom I sent it, seemed offended with me
for having translated it"* Couthon raged against the priesthood, but
could not tolerate a work which showed vengeance to be atheism, and
compassion--not merely for men, but for animals--true worship of God.
* The letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville, of which
the original French is before me, is quoted in an article in
Scribner, September, 1880, by Hon. E. B. Washbarne (former
Minister to France); it is reprinted in Remsburg's
compilation of testimonies: "Thomas Paine, the Apostle of
Religions and Political Liberty" (1880). See also p. 135
of this volume.
On the other hand, Paine's opposition to atheism would appear to have
brought him into danger from another quarter, in which religion could
not be distinguished from priestcraft. In a letter to Samuel Adams Paine
says that he endangered his life by opposing the king's execution, and
"a second time by opposing atheism." Those who denounce the "Age of
Reason" may thus learn that red-handed Couthon, who hewed men to pieces
before his Lord, and those who acknowledged no Lord, agreed with
them. Under these menaces the original work was as I have inferred,
suppressed. But the demand of Humanity was peremptory, and Paine
re-wrote it all, and more. When it appeared he was a prisoner; his
life was in Couthon's hands. He had personally nothing to gain by its
publication--neither wife, child, nor relative to reap benefit by its
sale. It was published as purely for the good of mankind as any work
ever written. Nothing could be more simply true than his declaration,
near the close of life:
"As in my political works my motive and object have been to give man an
elevated sense of his own character, and free him from the slavish and
superstitious absurdity of monarchy and hereditary government, so, in my
publications on religious subjects, my endeavors have been directed
to bring man to a right use of the reason that God has given him; to
impress on him the great principles of divine morality, justice, and
mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men, and to all creatures;
and to inspire in him a spirit of trust, confidence and consolation, in
his Creator, unshackled by the fables of books pretending to be the word
of God."
It is misleading at the present day to speak of Paine as an opponent
of Christianity. This would be true were Christianity judged by the
authorized formulas of any church; but nothing now acknowledged as
Christianity by enlightened Christians of any denomination was known
to him. In our time, when the humanizing wave, passing through all
churches, drowns old controversies, floats the dogmas, till it seems
ungenerous to quote creeds and confessions in the presence of our
"orthodox" lovers of man--even "totally depraved" and divinely doomed
man--the theological eighteenth century is inconceivable. Could one
wander from any of our churches, unless of the Christian Pagans or
remote villagers (_pagani_), into those of the last century, he would
find himself moving in a wilderness of cinders, with only the plaintive
song of John and Charles Wesley to break the solitude. If he would hear
recognition of the human Jesus, on whose credit the crowned Christ is
now maintained, he would be sharply told that it were a sin to "know
Christ after the flesh," and must seek such recognition among those
stoned as infidels. Three noble and pathetic tributes to the Man of
Nazareth are audible from the last century--those of Rousseau, Voltaire,
and Paine. From its theologians and its pulpits not one! Should the
tribute of Paine be to-day submitted, without his name, to our most
eminent divines, even to leading American and English Bishops, beside
any theological estimate of Christ from the same century, the Jesus of
Paine would be surely preferred.
Should our cultured Christian of to-day press beyond those sectarian,
miserable controversies of the eighteenth century, known to him now as
cold ashes, into the seventeenth century, he would find himself in a
comparatively embowered land; that is, in England, and in a few oases
in America--like that of Roger Williams in Rhode Island. In England he
would find brain and heart still in harmony, as in Tillotson and South;
still more in Bishop Jeremy Taylor, "Shakespeare of divines." He would
hear this Jeremy reject the notions of original sin and transmitted
guilt, maintain the "liberty of prophesying," and that none should
suffer for conclusions concerning a book so difficult of interpretation
as the Bible. In those unsophisticated years Jesus and the disciples
and the Marys still wore about them the reality gained in miracle-plays.
What Paine need arise where poets wrote the creed, and men knew the
Jesus of whom Thomas Dekker wrote:
"The best of men
That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer;
A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit,
The first true gentleman that ever breathed."
Dean Swift, whose youth was nourished in that living age, passed into
the era of dismal disputes, where he found the churches "dormitories of
the living as well as of the dead." Some ten years before Paine's birth
the Dean wrote: "Since the union of Divinity and Humanity is the great
Article of our Religion, 't is odd to see some clergymen, in their
writings of Divinity, wholly devoid of Humanity." Men have, he said,
enough religion to hate, but not to love. Had the Dean lived to the
middle of the eighteenth century he might have discovered exceptions
to this holy heartlessness, chiefly among those he had traditionally
feared--the Socinians. These, like the Magdalene, were seeking the lost
humanity of Jesus. He would have sympathized with Wesley, who escaped
from "dormitories of the living" far enough to publish the Life of a
Socinian (Firmin), with the brave apology, "I am sick of opinions, give
me the life." But Socianism, in eagerness to disown its bolder children,
presently lost the heart of Jesus, and when Paine was recovering it the
best of them could not comprehend his separation of the man from the
myth. So came on the desiccated Christianity of which Emerson said,
even among the Unitarians of fifty years ago, "The prayers and even the
dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Denderah, wholly insulated
from anything now extant in the life and business of the people."
Emerson may have been reading Paine's idea that Christ and the Twelve
were mythically connected with Sun and Zodiac, this speculation being
an indication of their distance from the Jesus he tenderly revered. If
Paine rent the temple-veils of his time, and revealed the stony images
behind them, albeit with rudeness, let it not be supposed that those
forms were akin to the Jesus and the Marys whom skeptical criticism is
re-incarnating, so that they dwell with us. Outside Paine's heart the
Christ of his time was not more like the Jesus of our time than Jupiter
was like the Prometheus he bound on a rock. The English Christ was not
the Son of Man, but a Prince of Dogma, bearing handcuffs for all who
reasoned about him; a potent phantasm that tore honest thinkers
from their families and cast them into outer darkness, because they
circulated the works of Paine, which reminded the clergy that the Jesus
even of their own Bible sentenced those only who ministered not to the
hungry and naked, the sick and in prison. Paine's religious culture was
English. There the brain had retreated to deistic caves, the heart had
gone off to "Salvationism" of the time; the churches were given over
to the formalist and the politician, who carried divine sanction to the
repetition of biblical oppressions and massacres by Burke and Pitt. And
in all the world there had not been one to cry _Sursum Corda_ against
the consecrated tyranny until that throb of Paine's heart which
brought on it the vulture. But to-day, were we not swayed by names and
prejudices, it would bring on that prophet of the divine humanity, even
the Christian dove.
Soon after the appearance of Part First of the "Age of Reason" it
was expurgated of its negative criticisms, probably by some English
Unitarians, and published as a sermon, with text from Job xi., 7: "Canst
thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to
perfection?" It was printed anonymously; and were its sixteen pages
read in any orthodox church to-day it would be regarded as admirable.
It might be criticised by left wings as somewhat old-fashioned in the
warmth of its theism. It is fortunate that Paine's name was not appended
to this doubtful use of his work, for it would have been a serious
misrepresentation.*
* "A Lecture on the Existence and Attributes of the Deity,
as Deduced from a Contemplation of His Works. M,DCC,XCV."
The copy in my possession is inscribed with pen: "This was
J. Joyce's copy, and noticed by him as Paine's work." Mr.
Joyce was a Unitarian minister. It is probable that the
suppression of Paine's name was in deference to his
outlawry, and to the dread, by a sect whose legal position
was precarious, of any suspicion of connection with
"Painite" principles.
That his Religion of Humanity took the deistical form was an
evolutionary necessity. English deism was not a religion, but at first a
philosophy, and afterwards a scientific generalization. Its founder, as
a philosophy, Herbert of Cherbury, had created the matrix in which
was formed the Quaker religion of the "inner light," by which Paine's
childhood was nurtured; its founder as a scientific theory of creation,
Sir Isaac Newton, had determined the matrix in which all unorthodox
systems should originate. The real issue was between a sanctified
ancient science and a modern science. The utilitarian English race,
always the stronghold of science, had established the freedom of the
new deism, which thus became the mould into which all unorthodoxies ran.
From the time of Newton, English and American thought and belief have
steadily become Unitarian. The dualism of Jesus, the thousand years
of faith which gave every soul its post in a great war between God
and Satan, without which there would have been no church, has steadily
receded before a monotheism which, under whatever verbal disguises,
makes the deity author of all evil. English Deism prevailed only to be
reconquered into alliance with a tribal god of antiquity, developed
into the tutelar deity of Christendom. And this evolution involved the
transformation of Jesus into Jehovah, deity of a "chosen" or "elect"
people. It was impossible for an apostle of the international republic,
of the human brotherhood, whose Father was degraded by any notion of
favoritism to a race, or to a "first-born son," to accept a name in
which foreign religions had been harried, and Christendom established on
a throne of thinkers' skulls. The philosophical and scientific deism of
Herbert and Newton had grown cold in Paine's time, but it was detached
from all the internecine figure-heads called gods; it appealed to the
reason of all mankind; and in that manger, amid the beasts, royal and
revolutionary, was cradled anew the divine humanity.
Paine wrote "Deism" on his banner in a militant rather than an
affirmative way. He was aiming to rescue the divine Idea from
traditional degradations in order that he might with it confront a
revolutionary Atheism defying the celestial monarchy. In a later work,
speaking of a theological book, "An Antidote to Deism," he remarks: "An
antidote to Deism must be Atheism." So far as it is theological, the
"Age of Reason" was meant to combat Infidelity. It raised before the
French the pure deity of Herbert, of Newton, and other English deists
whose works were unknown in France. But when we scrutinize Paine's
positive Theism we find a distinctive nucleus forming within the
nebulous mass of deistical speculations. Paine recognizes a deity only
in the astronomic laws and intelligible order of the universe, and in
the corresponding reason and moral nature of man. Like Kant, he was
filled with awe by the starry heavens and man's sense of right*. The
first part of the "Age of Reason" is chiefly astronomical; with those
celestial wonders he contrasts such stories as that of Samson and the
foxes. "When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and
governs the incomprehensible Whole, of which the utmost ken of human
sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such
paltry stories the word of God." Then turning to the Atheist he says:
"We did not make ourselves; we did not make the principles of science,
which we discover and apply but cannot alter." The only revelation of
God in which he believes is "the universal display of himself in the
works of creation, and that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad
actions, and disposition to do good ones." "The only idea we can have
of serving God, is that of contributing to the happiness of the living
creation that God has made."
* Astronomy, as we know, he had studied profoundly. In early
life he had studied astronomic globes, purchased at the cost
of many a dinner, and the orrery(sp), and attended lectures
at the Royal Society. In the "Age of Reason" he writes,
twenty-one years before Herschel's famous paper on the
Nebulae: "The probability is that each of those fixed stars
is also a sun, round which another system of worlds or
planets, though too remote for as to discover, performs its
revolutions."
It thus appears that in Paine's Theism the deity is made manifest, not
by omnipotence, a word I do not remember in his theories, but in this
correspondence of universal order and bounty with rcason and conscience,
and the humane heart In later works this speculative side of his Theism
presented a remarkable Zoroastrian variation. When pressed with Bishop
Butler's terrible argument against previous Deism,--that the God of
the Bible is no more cruel than the God of Nature,--Paine declared his
preference for the Persian religion, which exonerated the deity from
responsibility for natural evils, above the Hebrew which attributed
such things to God. He was willing to sacrifice God's omnipotence to
his humanity. He repudiates every notion of a devil, but was evidently
unwilling to ascribe the unconquered realms of chaos to the divine Being
in whom he believed.
Thus, while theology was lowering Jesus to a mere King, glorying in
baubles of crown and throne, pleased with adulation, and developing
him into an authorizor of all the ills and agonies of the world, so
depriving him of his humanity, Paine was recovering from the universe
something like the religion of Jesus himself. "Why even of yourselves
judge ye not what is right" In affirming the Religion of Humanity, Paine
did not mean what Comte meant, a personification of the continuous life
of our race*; nor did he merely mean benevolence towards all living
creatures.
* Paine's friend and fellow-prisoner, Anacharsis Clootz, was
the first to describe Humanity as "L'Etre Supreme."
He affirmed a Religion based on the authentic divinity of that which
is supreme in human nature and distinctive of it The sense of right,
justice, love, mercy, is God himself in man; this spirit judges all
things,--all alleged revelations, all gods. In affirming a deity too
good, loving, just, to do what is ascribed to Jahve, Paine was animated
by the same spirit that led the early believer to turn from heartless
elemental gods to one born of woman, bearing in his breast a human
heart. Pauline theology took away this human divinity, and effected a
restoration, by making the Son of Man Jehovah, and commanding the heart
back from its seat of judgment, where Jesus had set it. "Shall the clay
say to the potter, why hast thou formed me thus?" "Yes," answered
Paine, "if the thing felt itself hurt, and could speak." He knew as did
Emerson, whom he often anticipates, that "no god dare wrong a worm."
The force of the "Age of Reason" is not in its theology, though this
ethical variation of Deism in the direction of humanity is of exceeding
interest to students who would trace the evolution of avatars and
incarnations. Paine's theology was but gradually developed, and in this
work is visible only as a tide beginning to rise under the fiery orb of
his religious passion. For abstract theology he cares little. "If the
belief of errors not morally bad did no mischief, it would make no part
of the moral duty of man to oppose and remove them." He evinces regret
that the New Testament, containing so many elevated moral precepts,
should, by leaning on supposed prophecies in the Old Testament, have
been burdened with its barbarities. "It must follow the fate of its
foundation." This fatal connection, he knows, is not the work of Jesus;
he ascribes it to the church which evoked from the Old Testament a
crushing system of priestly and imperial power reversing the benign
principles of Jesus. It is this oppression, the throne of all
oppressions, that he assails. His affirmations of the human deity are
thus mainly expressed in his vehement denials.
This long chapter must now draw to a close. It would need a volume to
follow thoroughly the argument of this epoch-making book, to which
I have here written only an introduction, calling attention to its
evolutionary factors, historical and spiritual. Such then was the new
Pilgrim's Progress. As in that earlier prison, at Bedford, there shone
in Paine's cell in the Luxembourg a great and imperishable vision, which
multitudes are still following. The book is accessible in many editions.
The Christian teacher of to-day may well ponder this fact. The atheists
and secularists of our time are printing, reading, revering a work that
opposes their opinions. For above its arguments and criticisms they see
the faithful heart contending with a mighty Apollyon, girt with all the
forces of revolutionary and Royal Terrorism. Just this one Englishman,
born again in America, confronting George III. and Robespierre on earth
and tearing the like of them from the throne of the universe! Were it
only for the grandeur of this spectacle in the past Paine would maintain
his hold on thoughtful minds.
But in America the hold is deeper than that. In this self-forgetting
insurrection of the human heart against deified Inhumanity there is an
expression of the inarticulate wrath of humanity against continuance of
the same wrong. In the circulation throughout the earth of the Bible as
the Word of God, even after its thousand serious errors of translation
are turned, by exposure, into falsehoods; in the deliverance to savages
of a scriptural sanction of their tomahawks and poisoned arrows; in the
diffusion among cruel tribes of a religion based on human sacrifice,
after intelligence has abandoned it; in the preservation of costly
services to a deity who "needs nothing at men's hands," beside hovels
of the poor who need much; in an exemption of sectarian property from
taxation which taxes every man to support the sects, and continues the
alliance of church and state; in these things, and others--the list is
long--there is still visible, however refined, the sting and claw of the
Apollyon against whom Paine hurled his far-reaching dart. The "Age of
Reason" was at first published in America by a religious house, and as
a religious book. It was circulated in Virginia by Washington's old
friend, Parson Weems. It is still circulated, though by supposed
unbelievers, as a religious book, and such it is.
Its religion is expressed largely in those same denunciations which
theologians resent. I have explained them; polite agnostics apologize
for them, or cast Paine over as a Jonah of the rationalistic ship. But
to make one expression more gentle would mar the work. As it stands,
with all its violences and faults, it represents, as no elaborate or
polite treatise could, the agony and bloody sweat of a heart breaking in
the presence of crucified Humanity. What dear heads, what noble hearts
had that man seen laid low; what shrieks had he heard in the desolate
homes of the Condorcets, the Brissots; what Canaanite and Midianite
massacres had he seen before the altar of Brotherhood, erected by
himself! And all because every human being had been taught from his
cradle that there is something more sacred than humanity, and to which
man should be sacrificed. Of all those mas-sacred thinkers not one voice
remains: they have gone silent: over their reeking guillotine sits
the gloating Apollyon of Inhumanity. But here is one man, a prisoner,
preparing for his long silence. He alone can speak for those slain
between the throne and the altar. In these outbursts of laughter and
tears, these outcries that think not of literary style, these appeals
from surrounding chaos to the starry realm of order, from the tribune of
vengeance to the sun shining for all, this passionate horror of cruelty
in the powerful which will brave a heartless heaven or hell with its
immortal indignation,--in all these the unfettered mind may hear the
wail of enthralled Europe, sinking back choked with its blood, under the
chain it tried to break. So long as a link remains of the same chain,
binding reason or heart, Paine's "Age of Reason" will live. It is not a
mere book--it is a man's heart.