TOM PAINE
Somewhere or other there is a poem to the effect that God moves in a
mysterious way, his wonders to perform.
The truth of this statement is most apparent to those who have studied
the history of the Atlantic seaboard.
During the first half of the seventeenth century the northern part of the
American continent was settled by people who had gone so far in their
devotion to the ideals of the Old Testament that an unsuspecting visitor
might have taken them for followers of Moses, rather than disciples of
the words of Christ. Cut off from the rest of Europe by a very wide and
very stormy and very cold expanse of ocean, these pioneers had set up
a spiritual reign of terror which had culminated in the witch-hunting
orgies of the Mather family.
Now at first sight it seems not very likely that those two reverend
gentlemen could in any way be held responsible for the very tolerant
tendencies which we find expounded with such able vigor in the
Constitution of the United States and in the many documents that were
written immediately before the outbreak of hostilities between England
and her former colonies. Yet such is undoubtedly the case, for the period
of repression of the seventeenth century was so terrible that it was
bound to create a furious reaction in favor of a more liberal point of
view.
This does not mean that all the colonists suddenly sent for the collected
works of Socinius and ceased to frighten little children with stories
about Sodom and Gomorrah. But their leaders were almost without
exception representatives of the new school of thought and with great
ability and tact they infused their own conceptions of tolerance into the
parchment platform upon which the edifice of their new and independent
nation was to be erected.
They might not have been quite so successful if they had been obliged to
deal with one united country. But colonization in the northern part of
America had always been a complicated business. The Swedish Lutherans had
explored part of the territory. The French had sent over some of their
Huguenots. The Dutch Arminians had occupied a large share of the land.
While almost every sort and variety of English sect had at one time or
another tried to found a little Paradise of its own in the wilderness
between the Hudson Bay and the Gulf of Mexico.
This had made for a variety of religious expression and so well had the
different denominations been balanced that in several of the colonies a
crude and rudimentary form of mutual forbearance had been forced upon a
people who under ordinary circumstances would have been forever at each
other’s throats.
This development had been very unwelcome to the reverend gentlemen who
prospered where others quarreled. For years after the advent of the new
spirit of charity they had continued their struggle for the maintenance
of the old ideal of rectitude. They had achieved very little but they had
successfully estranged many of the younger men from a creed which seemed
to have borrowed its conceptions of mercy and kindliness from some of its
more ferocious Indian neighbors.
Fortunately for our country, the men who bore the brunt of battle in the
long struggle for freedom belonged to this small but courageous group of
dissenters.
Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty
tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The
American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without
sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more
intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand
that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had
never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then
became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away
from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of
life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were
faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused
to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had
expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able
to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate
man’s conscience.”
And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social
program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots
incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their
ideals before the high court of public opinion.
It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of Virginia had
they known that some of the oratory to which they listened with such
profound respect was directly inspired by their arch-enemies, the
Libertines. But Thomas Jefferson, their most successful politician, was
himself a man of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that
religion could only be regulated by reason and conviction and not by
force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal right to the free
exercise of their religion according to the dictates of their conscience,
he merely repeated what had been thought and written before by Voltaire
and Bayle and Spinoza and Erasmus.
And later when the following heresies were heard: “that no declaration of
faith should be required as a condition of obtaining any public office in
the United States,” or “that Congress should make no law which referred
to the establishment of religion or which prohibited the free exercise
thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.
In this way the United States came to be the first country where religion
was definitely separated from politics; the first country where no
candidate for office was forced to show his Sunday School certificate
before he could accept the nomination; the first country in which people
could, as far as the law was concerned, worship or fail to worship as
they pleased.
But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter) the average
man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable to follow them as soon
as they deviated the least little bit from the beaten track. Not only
did many of the states continue to impose certain restrictions upon
those of their subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but
the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or Bostonians or
Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant of those who did not
share their own views as if they had never read a single line of their
own Constitution. All of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the
case of Thomas Paine.
Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of the Americans.
He was the publicity man of the Revolution.
By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor; by instinct
and training, a rebel. He was forty years old before he visited the
colonies. While on a visit to London he had met Benjamin Franklin and had
received the excellent advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided
with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had sailed for
Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Franklin, to
found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”
Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon found himself in the
midst of those events that were trying men’s souls. And being possessed
of a singularly well-ordered mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted
collection of American grievances and had incorporated them into a
pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application of “common
sense” should convince the people that the American cause was a just
cause and deserved the hearty coöperation of all loyal patriots.
This little book at once found its way to England and to the continent
where it informed many people for the first time in their lives that
there was such a thing as “an American nation” and that it had an
excellent right, yea, it was its sacred duty to make war upon the mother
country.
As soon as the Revolution was over, Paine went back to Europe to show the
English people the supposed absurdities of the government under which
they lived. It was a time when terrible things were happening along the
banks of the Seine and when respectable Britishers were beginning to look
across the Channel with very serious misgivings.
A certain Edmund Burke had just published his panic-stricken “Reflections
on the French Revolution.” Paine answered with a furious counter-blast of
his own called “The Rights of Man” and as a result the English government
ordered him to be tried for high treason.
Meanwhile his French admirers had elected him to the Convention and
Paine, who did not know a word of French but was an optimist, accepted
the honor and went to Paris. There he lived until he fell under the
suspicion of Robespierre. Knowing that at any moment he might be arrested
and decapitated, he hastily finished a book that was to contain his
philosophy of life. It was called “The Age of Reason.” The first part was
published just before he was taken to prison. The second part was written
during the ten months he spent in jail.
Paine believed that true religion, what he called “the religion of
humanity,” had two enemies, atheism on the one hand and fanaticism on
the other. But when he gave expression to this thought he was attacked
by every one and when he returned to America in 1802 he was treated with
such profound and relentless hatred that his reputation as a “dirty
little atheist” has survived him by more than a century.
It is true that nothing happened to him. He was not hanged or burned or
broken on the wheel. He was merely shunned by all his neighbors, little
boys were encouraged to stick their tongues out at him when he ventured
to leave his home, and at the time of his death he was an embittered and
forgotten man who found relief for his anger in writing foolish political
tracts against the other heroes of the Revolution.
This seems a most unfortunate sequel to a splendid beginning.
But it is typical of something that has repeatedly happened during the
history of the last two thousand years.
As soon as public intolerance has spent its fury, private intolerance
begins.
And lynchings start when official executions have come to an end.