The New Rochelle Pioneer, 3 June 1899
About a thousand people assembled last Tuesday on the White Plains Road at Thomas Paine’s monument to witness the unveiling of the new bronze bust of the patriot and religious revolutionist.
Robert Ingersoll was expected to be on hand to make a speech, but disappointed many.
To-day Paine is looked upon as a religious and superstitious man by many so called “free thinkers”. Thomas Paine believed in a personal God, and far from attacking the claim of the existence of a Higher Power ruling the Universe, he bowed most humbly in awe and supplication before this Power.
His tremendous and unforgivable sin in the eyes of the majority of his day, lay in his attacking the infallibility of the Bible, and criticising what he regarded as the mistake of the church in thinking to claim that it yet encircled all truth, and had gained all light and understanding for all time.
He would expunge the errors as education made them clear to us, and get nearer the truth to which man’s conceit and vanity of imagination had through the ages attached barnacles of fable and error.
Mr. Briggs and the Briggites in the Presbyterian church are advanced Painites to-day, as perhaps are Bishop Potter and the Potterites in the Episcopal church.
Thomas Paine, who has been for a century defamed and reviled, as though through a sense of duty, by the better elements in every community, and scoffed at as an infidel and one who it was asserted would sweep away every hope of looking above and beyond ourselves for inspiration and uplifting endeavor, is seemingly to-day right in the midst of the new circle of ecclesiastics who are dictating in a most sudden and astounding way, and showing every surety of soon gaining control, in our Protestant churches.
Paine was slandered that the church might not suffer through a too sudden revolution of thought creating chaos before the slow moving evolution going on in the minds of the many. He was a martyr to being ahead of his time, and insisting that all should at once understand what they were not yet prepared to understand, and therefore could not safely be allowed to listen to seriously.
Such martyrs hasten evolution by many generations, but they must always be martyrs in their own day and generation.
Thomas Paine was one of the greatest patriots America has produced, and but for his untimely attack upon what he proclaimed the errors of the church would have ranked with Washington Jefferson and Franklin in the minds of the people of this day. It was his writings and enthusiasm that largely aroused the American mind to resent the dictation of England, and cheered the poor, ragged, half starved and half frozen little bands under Washington into not giving up disheartened and hopeless, but to hold out with indomitable will. It was Thomas Paine who more than any other one man aroused France to take sides with our cause, and who so impressed the force and energy of his will upon the French people that he was later made a representative of the French in their own revolution against Royalty.
But the honors, eulogiums, and fame that would have to this day been heaped upon his name everywhere, were swept away, and contumely, scorn, and even slander took their place, when he tried a hundred years before the people could understand, to prove to them that the infinite spirit was spread through the universe to be grasped by man, to age by age nurse his ignorant mind and undeveloped understanding and reason ever toward higher and broader light than that alone which those before him had grown into the power to see aright.
Thomas Paine did not believe that all truth could be given to man to-day, because man with all his conceit has only started on the road of evolution toward the understanding of God. And the infinite spirit working through man, cannot get back to God except through evolution of reason and understanding in man, age by age. Science is the supreme temple of God unfolding truth to man, and it and the Church are becoming one, as the light of the past century beating upon the reason of man has at last shown him that they must be one.
The Church to-day is moving along to represent indisputable science, as the light of God that has forced its way into the understanding of man. Civilization or society must have a rallying ground and guide to the truth as yet unfolded, and the Church must ever be that rallying ground and guide.
New Rochelle will be known the world over during the coming century as the home and death place of Paine, and an increasing number will year by year be drawn here to view the scenes and environment of his last years, and the monument which marks what had been his tomb in this country.