“In blasphemy and gross infidelity,” said the Centinel newspaper, Elihu Palmer “‘surpassed The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine and all other deist and atheist books.” Elihu Palmer (1764 1806) was a little-known freethinker who, even after losing his vision, remained active in the intellectual debates of his time. Palmer emerged as one of the leading exponents of deism in the First American Republic. Drawing upon thinkers such as Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Jefferson, Palmer developed his philosophy by engaging with key currents of Enlightenment thought in North America, including Isaac Ledyard’s materialism, Thomas Paine’s deism, and John Stewart’s vitalism. For Palmer, true morality was rooted in an interconnected system encompassing all living matter. His ideas were widely disseminated through his principal work, published in 1801 and expanded in 1802, in which he proposed replacing religious dogma with ethics based on justice and benevolence. 

Born in 1764 into a family of farmers in Connecticut, Palmer chose a public life after the end of the war in 1783, enrolling at Dartmouth College with the goal of pursuing the ministry or law. In 1787, he began his career as a preacher. At the First Presbyterian Church in Newtown, Long Island, an observer noted that he often set aside discussions of sin and instead urged his listeners to spend the day in innocent joys. Indeed, a year after beginning his ministry, he rejected Calvinist principles and became the “archetype of the radical and democratic deist.”

Soon after, he took a position at a Presbyterian church in Newtown, Long Island, where he met the physician Isaac Ledyard, who introduced him to the idea of eternal, living matter, questioning the existence of God as a transcendent entity. In 1792, he joined Philadelphia’s Society of Deist Natural Philosophers, which included Franklin and Jefferson, where he publicly denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, attracting the attention of clergy and generating tensions between religious traditionalism and new rationalist currents. When preaching to Baptists, he became frustrated with his audience’s reactions, as they expected nothing more than confirmations of their own doctrines. In the Federal Gazette, he wrote that opinions should not be subject to the whims of the masses—they should stand or fall solely by their coherence and truth.

TRAGEDY!

In August 1793, Palmer faced personal tragedy: a yellow fever outbreak on Water Street killed his wife, and he, treated by Dr. Benjamin Rush, was left blind. His enemies interpreted this misfortune as divine retribution for his heresies. Palmer then left his children to be raised by relatives in Connecticut and became an eloquent and tireless advocate of deism and vitalism. He became known for his sermons at the Deistical Society of New York and the Society of Theophilanthropists in Philadelphia.

In 1794, Palmer was profoundly influenced by Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason. He proclaimed Paine “one of the first and best writers of all time, and probably the most important man ever to exist on the face of the earth.” In Philadelphia, he resided in the home of radical poet Philip Freneau and became involved in the dissemination of the first deist newspaper in the Americas, The Temple of Reason, created and edited by Irish immigrant Denis Driscol. Between 1803 and 1805, he maintained his own weekly newspaper, Prospect; or, View of the Moral World. Due to his physical condition, Palmer wrote with the assistance of freethinker Mary Powel, whom he later married. Additionally, Palmer met John Stewart, who introduced the idea of sensitive atoms—particles that recorded sensations and composed the universe. This notion was incorporated into Palmer’s thought, reinforcing his vision of eternal and interconnected matter.

In 1801, he published his principal work, Principles of Nature; or, A Development of the Moral Causes of Happiness and Misery among the Human Species, in New York. The second and third editions, identical, were published in 1802 and 1806. Historian Kerry S. Walters, a professor at Gettysburg College and a leading scholar of deist thought, republished the third edition in 1990 with an introduction.

Like Paine in The Age of Reason, Palmer saw Creation as the true word of God, in contrast to revelations and miracles. Alongside this, he described a conception of creation that was heterodox even among deists: for him, a divine force engendered the world solely from matter. This supreme force, therefore, resided in matter itself—it was not necessarily sentient in the way humans conceived it, nor did it require worship. Nothing existed above or below matter—God’s laws were perfect, and believing in miracles would be an offense to the Creator. Recognizing this force, Palmer argued, would lead to a sense of universal benevolence embracing all things, inspiring the abolition of slavery, war, and all forms of oppression. Politics and religion were deeply intertwined—deism, for Palmer, was an eminently ethical-political force.

BLASPHEMY!

In the early 19th century, Palmer’s writings, like those of Paine, became targets of criticism. His political enemies used his ideas to create scandals, linking him to Jefferson in an effort to discredit the president. In March 1806, Palmer returned to Philadelphia for a final series of lectures but died on the 31st of that month at the age of 41 due to lung inflammation. His work, Principles of Nature, left an important legacy, promoting a philosophy based on reason, individual responsibility, and the pursuit of a morality that benefited society as a whole. Palmer believed that understanding the material condition shared by all things would foster an ethics of compassion, transforming human behavior and, consequently, the world.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Aponte, Ryan Nicholas. Dharma of the Founders: Buddhism within the Philosophies of Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Elihu Palmer. Georgetown Georgetown University, 2012.

Carvalho, Daniel Gomes de. O pensamento radical de Thomas Paine (1793-1797): artífice e obra da Revolução Francesa. 2017. Tese (Doutorado em História Social) – Faculdade de Filosofia, Letras e Ciências Humanas, Universidade de São Paulo, São Paulo, 2017. doi:10.11606/T.8.2018.tde-12062018-135137.

Fischer, Kirsten. American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Fischer, Kirsten. “Elihu Palmer’s Radical Religion in the Early Republic.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 73, no. 3, (Jul. 2016), pp. 501-530.

May, Henry F. The Enlightenment in America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1976.

Minardi, Margot. “American Freethinker: Elihu Palmer and the Struggle for Religious Freedom in the New Nation” by Kirsten Fischer (Review).” Journal of the Early Republic 41, no. 4 (2021): 694–97. doi:10.1353/jer.2021.0095.
Walters, Kerry S. The American Deists: Voices of Reason and Dissent in the Early Republic. Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1992. doi:10.1353/book.94120.

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By Judah Freed

The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine had “democratic consequences,” said Dr. Daniel Gomes de Carvalho, Professor of Modern History at the University of São Paulo, Brazil. 

In a February 15 talk at the Paine Memorial Building in New Rochelle, Dr. Carvalho said, “By criticizing the adulterous connection between church and state, by demonstrating the impossibility of the Bible being the word of God, and by proposing the equality of all creatures before God, Paine had devastating effects on the governments using religion to maintain hierarchies and oppression.” 

As a result of Paine, he said, “The question of democracy was at the heart of religious debate at the time.” These same debates continue today. 

Livestreaming on Zoom from the Memorial Building, the program signals growing global reach for the Thomas Paine Historical Association. 

Daniel Carvalho earned a doctorate from the University of São Paulo in 2017. He then served as a professor in the University of Brasília Graduate Program in Ideas. He is the author of Thomas Paine and the French Revolution (Editora Paco, 2023).

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By Richard Briles Moriarty

Thomas Paine and the banning of his works have long been intertwined. Suppression of his Rights of Man by the English government raged as he joined the French National Convention. 

After King Louis XVI was convicted of treason in 1792, Thomas Paine argued that the former king had become “Citizen Louis Capet.” Rather than execute him, Paine said he should be banished to America for immersion and education in republican principles.

During his startlingly bold presentation to the French National Convention, Paine quoted Robespierre’s arguments in 1791 that “the death penalty is essentially unjust and… the most repressive of penalties,” that it “multiplies crimes more than it prevents them” and constitutes “cowardly assassinations” through which one crime is punished by another. 

As Marat assaulted Paine’s arguments, Robespierre remained silent, but likely gritted his teeth as Paine quoted his own eloquent and unanswerable plea against capital punishment. Paine’s persuasiveness nearly turned the tide. 

Paine’s position was dramatically more radical than that of Robespierre and Marat. Instead of treating Louis as a king gone bad, Paine proposed, consistent with his arguments since Common Sense, that all kings, simply because they are kings, are tyrants. 

Paine’s arguments were dangerous to the increasing yet tenuous dominance of Robespierre and the Jacobins. His plea not to kill the king was published by the French government in 1792, yet Paine’s efforts resulted in his 1793 imprisonment. 

Now jump ahead in time. Gutzon Borglum, designer of Mount Rushmore, sculpted an eight-foot statue of Paine for unveiling in Paris on the 200th anniversary of his birth in 1937. The statue showed Paine pleading to the National Convention to spare Louis Capet. 

When Nazi Germany conquered France, the statue was hidden from the Vichy Government, which at the instigation of the Nazis ordered removal of all “statues and monuments of copper alloys situated in public places and administrative locales,” purportedly “to recycle the metallic components for industrial production.” The real purpose was sending metals to Germany for recycling into military uses. 

In 1945, W.E. Woodward predicted that Borglum’s hidden statue would be unveiled in Paris in the near future, which it was in 1948. Despite plans for moving the statue to America, it remains far more appropriately in Paris on display in Parc Mountsouris. 

During World War II, Borglum’s statue was at risk less because Paine’s books were banned by the Nazis — although they were — and more because military lust demanded metal. 

Governments purportedly devoted to free speech are hardly immune to banning Pane’s books. 

R. Wolf Baldassarro observed in a 2011 blog post, “Banned Books Awareness: Thomas Paine,” that Common Sense in the 1950s was barred from U.S. Information Service libraries during the McCarthy era by the government of the United States of America, the country whose name and perhaps existence Paine created through that very pamphlet. 

For more than a quarter-century, from 1795 to 1822, Paine’s The Age of Reason was banned in the United Kingdom, reports The Banned Books Compendium by Grigory Lukin. He noted that an English publisher of The Age of Reason was sentenced in 1797 to a year of hard labor. 

In 1819, Richard Carlile was prosecuted because he included The Age of Reason in a collection of Paine’s works. Carlile read the entire book into the court record, ensuring even wider publication. He then was sentenced to a year in prison. Carlile actually served six years, Lukin wrote, because “he refused any ‘legal conditions’ on his release.” 

Lukin identified the 32 books most often banned worldwide. Two of those books, Rights of Man and The Age of Reason, were authored by Paine. 

As true from Common Sense forward, governments purporting to support democracy and free speech will resist the radical impact of Paine’s thoughts. People themselves can seek out his thoughts, absorb and act on them, a bottom-up legacy which would make Paine rejoice. 

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It’s tough to choose a favorite quote by Thomas Paine — American Founder, career revolutionary, and perennial skeptic. Pithy sayings and memorable phrases are Paine’s stock-in-trade, from “We have in it in our power to begin the world over again” to “These are the times that try men’s souls” and even “United States of America” – which first appeared, formally capitalized as our country’s name, in Paine’s American Crisis. In fact, Paine is so quotable that he’s even been credited (or blamed) for a number of things he never said or wrote. The Thomas Paine National Historical Association maintains a handy list of these bogus Paine quotations.

Since I began reading his work in 2009, my personal list of valued (and often memorized) Paine quotations has piled up almost on its own, the way books pile up in odd corners of my bedroom. Most of my favorites are drawn from his deist work The Age of Reason (1794-1795), a rationalist and often satirical critique of the Bible and organized religion. The book is filled with beautiful, compact, often proverb-like turns of phrase: “the word mystery cannot be applied to moral truth, any more than obscurity can be applied to light,” “The word of God is the Creation we behold,” and perhaps most famously: “My own mind is my own church.”

Still, if I had to pick one line of Paine’s that struck me on first reading, and that continues to linger for reasons that I can only partially explain, it would be this:

“ … the glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without weariness …”

Yes, that’s Thomas Paine — also in The Age of Reason — here stepping, however briefly, into the role of nature poet. This passage might seem atypical of his work. It carries none of the rhetorical or political punch of his more famous dictums. There is no humor, no sarcasm, no argument to be clinched. It reads like something pulled from the Tao Te Ching, or perhaps from the work of Paine’s friend, the iconic romantic poet William Blake.

Yet this is the line I always return to in thinking about Paine’s life and works. For me, it expresses not only a love of nature, but a deep sense of kinship with and compassion for other living beings.

It also marks the place where the narrative of my own life intersects with Thomas Paine’s.

In the fall of 2009, I was in one of life’s valleys. Two years out from breast cancer treatment, emotionally and physically exhausted, I had begun to realize that my more-than-ten-year marriage was unraveling. The daily care of my seven-year-old autistic son was making me ever more homebound and isolated, and the clock on my still incomplete Ph.D. dissertation was about to expire.

Somehow, I also found myself absorbed in reading The Age of Reason. I consumed it at first in small bites – a page or two each day. For fiction-writing purposes, I told myself. Background to understand the Enlightenment as a time and place. Fodder for the great historical romance I was going to create.

It wasn’t long, however, before my research became an addiction. I found myself reading Paine for the sheer and sometimes perverse joy of it. I loved following the turns of his arguments. I savored his gift for irony, his keen eye for the illogical and absurd. I was fascinated by the way his writer’s voice could shift on a dime — from biting sarcasm to patient pedagogy to pure lyricism — sometimes in the space of a line or two. Thomas Paine became for me the eccentric but lovable friend who sat each day at my kitchen table, cheering me up with rude jokes about religion – about the Bible, heaven, hell, and the devil – all things that I had been taught to regard as deadly serious during my childhood.

One afternoon, as I was coming to the end of the book, Paine — after a series of bitter arguments with the apostle Paul — abruptly dropped his tone of relentless skepticism. As if reductionist logic had finally exhausted even him, he paused in his argument to simply observe. I followed his gaze — and suddenly there it was:

“Every animal in the creation excels us in something. The winged insects, without mentioning doves or eagles, can pass over more space with greater ease in a few minutes than man can in an hour. The glide of the smallest fish, in proportion to its bulk, exceeds us in motion almost beyond comparison, and without weariness. Even the sluggish snail can ascend from the bottom of a dungeon, where man, by the want of that ability, would perish; and a spider can launch itself from the top, as a playful amusement.”

I was reading aloud, as I sometimes do with very old or very complex works (slowing down and hearing the words often helps me to better understand). At that point, and for no good reason, my eyes teared up. My voice broke. I had no idea why.

It was only later that I learned Paine had written this portion of the book while recovering from nearly a year spent in a French prison during the Reign of Terror. He was fifty-seven years old at the time, and while he managed to escape the guillotine, the stress of the ordeal destroyed his health for the remainder of his life.Yet Paine continued to write, almost until the day he died, despite chronic physical pain and frequent bouts of deep depression. It isn’t surprising to find that in The Age of Reason, he expresses the wish for “a better body and a more convenient form.” “The personal powers of man,” he laments, “ … are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment …” It’s a rare moment of self-disclosure for a writer who most often defines himself through political rhetoric and the parsing of ideology.

As his biographers have noted, Paine tended to hide his private identity behind the assumed public roles of revolutionary and social critic. The historian Gordon Wood calls him America’s “first public intellectual.”

Accordingly, our culture has remembered him as an ideologue first, whether we see him as the rabble-rouser and maker of revolutions, or the scourge of religious creeds and establishment thought. Such caricatures, fostered in Paine’s own time – often by his enemies – go a long way to explain present-day efforts to make Paine over into a rabid nationalist or reduce him to ideological “bomb thrower.” I recently came across one piece on the internet arguing that Donald Trump, by virtue of making outrageous statements and voicing “anti-establishment” sentiments, was some sort of spiritual heir to Thomas Paine. The same sorts of claims have been made about Democratic insurgent candidate Bernie Sanders. Of course, neither Trump nor Sanders, nor any modern politician — could have written anything approaching Paine’s genius – and certainly not his brief and lyrical observation of the tiny fish.

Much of Paine’s writing, and particularly his descriptions of the natural world, do not fit neatly into the persona of either Paine the Patriot or Paine the Infidel. The detail of the fish gliding through the water is but one example.

In reading Paine at length, I find that he is not, in fact, generally a writer of “screeds.” Certainly, he can be caustic. He is often impassioned, with a tendency to get swept up in the drama and occasionally grand language of his own arguments (a trait that I, as a writer, find completely lovable). Paine can hurl insults with the best: his characterization of Edmund Burke as drama queen in Rights of Man is a witty extended metaphor that goes on for paragraphs. Yet undergirding all these writing choices – and that is what they are: strategic choices — something else is at work.

In our own time, when politicians can sneer at concepts like empathy and community, it comes as a revelation to find that Paine’s work concerns itself deeply with those very things. The “smallest fish” in The Age of Reason – a seemingly insignificant and fleeting life – becomes the occasion for wonder, for gratitude, and for a much bigger sense of longing that goes beyond the self – a wish that life could be kinder and “without weariness” for us all.

It is Paine’s constant identification with the smallest and the least – the poor, the distressed, and the exploited – his refusal to hold the suffering of others at a distance, that often makes his work so compelling. Compassion is the strong undercurrent of his major works, even when his words are full of righteous rage. In Common Sense, Paine characterizes England as an unnatural parent, callous toward her children in the colonies. Defending the principles of the French Revolution in Rights of Man, he rebukes his intellectual rival, Edmund Burke, for failing to bestow “one glance of compassion” on the wretched prisoners of the Bastille or the sufferings of the common people of France. “Is this,” he asks of Burke, “the language of a rational man? Is it the language of a heart feeling as it ought to feel for the rights and happiness of the human race?” In the same work, Paine repeatedly calls forth images of individual human beings brutalized in under oppressive regimes, “whether sold into slavery, or tortured out of existence …”

In Paine’s very first pamphlet, The Case of the Officers of Excise, written in 1772, two years before he left England for America, we find moving examples of the writer’s first-hand knowledge of poverty, which in the eighteenth century was everywhere visible. “The rich,” Paine writes, “… may think I have drawn an unnatural portrait; but could they descend to the cold regions of want, the circle of polar poverty, they would find their opinions changing with the climate.”

He also understands that ideology is no cure for suffering:

“He who was never an hungered may argue finely on the subjection of his appetite; and he who never was distressed, may harangue as beautifully on the power of principle. But poverty, like grief, has an incurable deafness, which never hears; the oration loses all its edge; and ‘To be, or not to be’ becomes the only question.”

Throughout The Age of Reason, Paine rages against the cruelties visited upon women, children, and other innocents within the pages of the Bible. There are moments when Paine seems almost beside himself at these horrors committed in the name of god. Indeed, his most telling criticisms of scripture rely not on the parsing of fact and logic (though he gives us plenty of that), but upon the idea that the Bible as narrative – as simple storytelling – is ultimately destructive of human compassion.

“To believe the Bible to be true,” he writes, “we must unbelieve all our belief in the moral justice of god, and to read the Bible without horror, we must undo everything that is tender, sympathizing and benevolent in the heart of man.”

This, for me, is what makes Thomas Paine stand out, as a writer, as a personality – as a human being: his huge and fearless compassion – for suffering children, the poor, the disenfranchised, for the spider and “the smallest fish.” This empathy drives his ideology and breathes life into his words. That feeling is crystalized in the image of the tiny, darting fish. I cannot read Paine’s brief reflection on this least of creatures without also considering the “tender, sympathizing and benevolent” heart that took note of its existence, saw a glimpse of the divine, and raised a pen to share that feeling with readers.

A little more than a century after Paine’s death, freethinker and Civil War Union veteran John Remsberg wrote this of Paine’s works:

“They are full of charity, they glow with patriotism, they are warm with love. Even yet, within their lids methinks I feel the beating of the generous heart of him who penned them….”

It is exactly those qualities of love and generosity that draw me to back Thomas Paine’s writings again and again. It is exactly those qualities that we, as a society, stand in desperate need of now as we consider the future of our nation, as we contemplate the functions of a just, and yes, a compassionate, future world.

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In the first part of The Age of Reason, written during the French Revolution and completed we are told only a matter of hours before his arrest, Paine devotes some pages to a general account of astronomy as an introduction to his ideas on Christian theology. It is worth looking at this account in the light of knowledge as it was then and as it is now, and also to consider the sources of Paine’s information. 

He begins with a comment on the ‘plurality of worlds’, an idea from the ancient philosophers gaining acceptance in scientific circles in the eighteenth century by virtue of the work of Halley and Herschell, indicating the vastness of space and the lack of uniqueness in the existence of the earth. 

He then describes the solar system – the sun and its six satellites or worlds, all in annual motion around the sun, some satellites having their own satellites or moons in attendance, each world keeping its own track (the ecliptic) around the sun. Each world spins around itself (rotates on its own axis) and this causes day and night. Most worlds, in their self-rotation, are tilted against their line of movement around the sun (the obliquity of the ecliptic) and Paine quotes the correct figure for earth of 231/2°. It is this tilt that is responsible for the changing seasons and for the variation in the length of day and night over the world and throughout the seasons. Earth makes 365 rotations in one year’s orbit of the sun. 

The six planets are then described with their distances from the sun. These figures are incorrect now but the figures Paine gives for the earth’s distance, 88 million miles, agrees with the eighteenth century figure derived from Kepler’s Laws of about 1620. In 1772 Bode formulated his empirical law of planetary distances giving the measurements more accurately than hitherto, but this information would not have permeated the circles in which Paine moved after his departure for America. 

As proof that it is possible for man to know these distances he cites the fact that for centuries the precise date and time of eclipses and also the passage of a planet like Venus across the face of the sun (a transit) have been calculated and forecast. 

Beyond the solar system, ‘far beyond all power of calculation’ (until Bessel calculated the distance of 61 Cygni in 1838) are the ‘fixed’ stars, and these fixed stars ‘continue always at the same distance from each other, and always in the same place, so does the sun in the centre of the system’. William Herschel! communicated to the Royal Society in 1783 that this was not in fact so, and that all stars were moving but at rates indiscernible as yet to man. Paine repeats a current idea that these ‘fixed’ stars and suns probably all have their own planets in attendance upon them. Thus the immensity of space. 

‘All our knowledge of science is derived from the revolutions of those several planets or worlds of which our system is composed make in their circuit round the sun’. He regards this multiplicity as a benefit bestowed by the Creator – otherwise, all that matter in one globe with no revolutionary motion (there are echoes of Newton here) would have deprived our senses and our scientific knowledge, – it is from the sciences that all the mechanical are that contribute so much to our earthly felicity and comfort are derived’. Paine even suggests that the devotional gratitude of man is due to the Creator for this plurality. 

The same opportunities of knowledge are available to the inhabitants of neighbouring planets and to the inhabitants of planets of other suns in the universe. The idea of a society of worlds Paine finds cheerful – a happy contrivance of the almighty for the instruction of mankind. What then of the Christian faith and the ‘solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, with millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should devote all his care to this world and come to die in it? Has every world an Eve, an apple, a serpent and a redeemer?’ And so to the rest of The Age of Reason. 

Where did Paine obtain his astronomical information and instruction? It is unlikely he had any books with him, he certainly did not have a bible. Paris, seething with the Revolution, had the astronomer Jean-Sylvain Badly as mayor until his execution in 1793. Condorcet (author of Progress of the Human Spirit) and Lavoisier (the father of modern chemistry) were deeply involved and died in the Revolution. Laplace (‘the French Newton’) and the astronomer Joseph Jerome Lefrangois de Lalande were also in and around Paris at this time. But all these scientists, like Paine, would have been too busy to teach or discuss astronomy. So Paine would have had to recall the lectures and practical demonstrations he attended in London before he went to America. They were given by Benjamin Martin, James Ferguson and Dr. John Bevis. It is worthwhile looking at the careers of these three men, mentioned only by surname early in The Age of Reason, because the facts, derived from the Dictionary of National Biography, afford some light on Paine’s life in London. 

Benjamin Martin (1704-1782). A ploughboy to begin with, he began to teach the ‘three Rs’ at Guildford while studying to become a mathematician, instrument- maker, and general compiler of information! He read Newton’s Opticks (1705) and became an ardent follower of his ideas. He used a £500 legacy to buy instruments and books in order to become an itinerant lecturer. He had over thirty major publications to his name as well as a number of inventions. He perfected the Orrery (not named after its inventor, as Paine states, but after the patron of the copier of the invention!), and used his own version in his lectures. He lived in London at Hadley’s Quadrant in Fleet Street, from 1740 onwards. He died following attempted suicide in 1782. 

James Ferguson (1710-1776). A shepherd-boy in Banffshire at the age of ten. He took up medicine at Edinburgh but gave up to sketch embroidery patterns and then to paint portraits and continue his interest in astronomy. He used the income from his painting to enable him to begin as a teacher and lecturer in London in 1748, where he had arrived five years before. His book, Astronomy explained on Sir Isaac Newton’s Principles (1756), went to at least thirteen editions and was used by William Herschel! for his own study of astronomy. George III called on Ferguson for tuition in mechanics, and he was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1763. He became a busy lecturer in and around London, sometime also travelling to Newcastle, Derby, Bath and Bristol for speaking engagements. He occasionally had public disagreements with his wife – even in the middle of lectures! 

Dr. John Bevis (1693-1771). He studied medicine at Oxford and travelled widely in France and Italy before settling in London prior to 1730. Newton’s Opticks was his favourite reading matter, and in 1738 he gave up his practice and moved to Stoke Newington where he built his own observatory. Here, and at Greenwich, assisting Edmund Halley (who died in 1742) he did much astronomical work, and made a unique star-atlas, the Uranographia Brittanica, the plates of which, however, were sequestered in chancery when the printer, John Neale, became bankrupt, and earned a reputation (internationally) as an astronomer. When Nevil Maskelyne became Astronomer Royal following the death of the Rev. Nathaniel Bliss in 1764, Bevis, who had hoped for the appointment himself, returned to his medical practice, setting up at the Temple [London]. He was made a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1765. But astronomy got him in the end, for, continuing his studies, he was quickly from his telescope one day he fell, sustaining injuries from which he died. It could only have been at this period in his life, at the Temple, as a FRS, that Paine knew him. `As soon as I was able I purchased a pair of globes, and attended the philosophical lectures of Martin and Ferguson, and afterward acquainted with Dr. Bevis of the society called the Royal Society, then living in the Temple, and an excellent astronomer’. 

Moncure Conway in his Life of Paine mentions that [Thomas ‘Clio’] Rickman assigns the period of instruction in astronomy to the year 1767, but that he himself preferred the earlier time of 1757, when Paine would have been twenty years of age. Moreover, he suggests that Paine would have been too poor to afford globes in 1766-7. A study of the lives of his mentors shows clearly that he met Martin and Fergusson fairly certainly at the earlier time, but Dr. Bevis only at the later period, having bought his globes, terrestrial and celestial, ten years previously. On the first occasion he was a staymaker with Mr. Morris of Hanover Street; on his second he was teaching at Mr. Goodman’s and then in Kensington. 

There were some important events taking place in astronomy at this time but they seem to have escaped Paine’s notice. William Herschel discovered the seventh, telescopic , planet in 1781. He wanted to call it ‘George’s Star’, but it is now called Uranus. The scientists in Paris would have known all about this important discovery but one supposes that there would have been no occasion to discuss it with Paine; in any case he did not speak French fluently. There had been transits of Venus across the sun in 1761 and 1769 (the only occasions that century) and Paine mentions them in a footnote to prove how man can know sufficient to predict these and similar events. There must have been occasions of much general public comment – especially when scientists were trying to calculate accurately the distance of the sun from earth at these events. And then in 1789, Herschel made his great forty foot telescope, the envy of astronomers everywhere, indeed, the National Assembly was later to promote a prize for such an undertaking. However, time, scarcity of the necessary metals and shortage of money prevented any such project succeeding in stricken France. 

Thomas Paine had minimal experience at the eyepiece of a telescope and he showed no inclination later in his life to pursue astronomical studies. But in these brief pages of The Age of Reason he shows he has gained a very clear understanding of the solar system from those early days in London.

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Thomas Paine’s reputation among those who have not read his work — as I had not, before I sat down with Age of Reason not long ago — is as a somewhat scandalous free-thinker. According to A.JAyer, on whose 1988 critical biography Thomas Paine I have relied in preparing this appreciation, “As late as the beginning of this century, Theodore Roosevelt, twenty-sixth president of the United States, chose to refer to Thomas Paine as a ‘filthy little atheist.”‘ Had you asked me, I would have guessed Paine to be an atheist, although omitting the adjectives. The truth is that, although Paine was a ferocious enemy of religion, he was not at all an atheist. 

Introduction 

What you notice first about Age of Reason is Paine’s resonant style. His words have a paradoxical impact because his grammar and vocabulary are so simple. He gets great impact from a series of one-syllable words, as in the well-known phrases “My own mind is my own church,” or “These are the times that try men’s souls.° Some of the most pungent paragraphs of Age of Reason are crafted entirely of words of one and two syllables. 

Was the book all rhetoric, or did it present a reasoned argument? Was it an antique or could it speak to modern readers? I read it carefully; I checked some of Paine’s Biblical assertions; then I wrote this Appreciation in order to come to better terms with the book. 

In the end I found arguments that are sensible and detailed — although put forward in vitriolic, impassioned rhetoric — and behind them an amazingly up- to-date mind, one that could easily adapt to modern cosmology and notions of “emergent” phenomena. Paine the philosopher deserves to be better-known, especially among technologists. 

The Opening 

Theme Age of Reason is in two parts that were originally written and published a year apart. Paine set forth his own creed at the outset of the first part. 

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.

However, he wastes no time demonstrating why conventional believers find him uncomfortable: 

I do not believe in the creed professed by…the Protestant church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my church. All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish. appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit. 

These are the two main themes of the two volumes that comprise Age of Reason: A case for Deism, the belief that God can only be apprehended by rational study of the creation; and an energetic, passionate, and reasoned attack on the legitimacy of all organized religions, and in particular on the legitimacy of Christian dogma. 

Attack on Revelation 

Paine wastes no words on attacking the behaviour of churches or religionists. He realizes that an attack on the basis of behaviour, however bad the behaviour might be, is only peripheral and can easily be defended. Are the priests of some church venal? Well, they are only weak humans, and in any event their divinely-ordained rituals are still efficacious. Does some church sanction violence? Well, there are historical or cultural excuses, and in any event, this other church does not, what about it? And so forth. 

Instead, Paine attacks directly the one claim that has to be the anchor of every church’s dogma: that the church does the work of a Deity as revealed by the Deity. 

Every national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals…Each of those churches show certain books, which they call revelation, or the word of God. 

Paine mentions the Judaical scriptures, the Christian Bible, and the “Turkish” Koran (the Ottoman empire was the chief Islamic power of his day). How he would have relished having the Book of Mormon or Science and Health for further examples! 

Paine takes the axe of his rhetoric directly to this core concept, the very idea of “revelation,” as a message from God to a human. 

No one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a communication, if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other person, it is revelation to that person only. When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third,… and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it. It is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes to us second-hand, either verbally or in writing. 

He expands on this point for a few pages, but the fundamental thrust is home: the only proof that a particular scripture is a divine revelation is the assertion by a series of people that it is. Because all those reporters are human and capable of being deceived (and of deceiving), one has no reason to treat a scripture any differently than any other piece of reportage. Unless, of course, you can find something in the scripture that could not have been composed by the human mind. Paine doesn’t expect you will. For example, the commands claimed by Moses to have been given by God, 

…carry no internal evidence of divinity with them; they contain some good moral precepts, such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver, or a legislator, could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural intervention. 

Revelation, if it happens, is personal and cannot demand the belief of any other than its recipient. But Paine says there are other reasons to distrust scriptures of all kinds. First, it is trivial and demeaning to call simple history “revelation” or “inspired”: 

For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it… Revelation, therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth, of which man himself is the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and anecdotal parts of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the word of God…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. 

Most important, human language is simply inadequate as a container for anything called divine: 

…we must necessarily affix the idea, not only of unchangeableness, but of the utter impossibility of any change taking place, by any means or accident whatever, in that which we would honour with the name of the word of God; and therefore the word of God cannot exist in any written or human language. 

The continually progressive change to which the meaning of words is subject, the want of a universal language which renders translations necessary, the errors to which translations are again subject, the mistakes of copyists and printers, together with the possibility of wilful alteration, are of themselves evidences that the human language, whether in speech or in print, cannot be the vehicle of the word of God. 

But is not revelation verified by miracles? Of course not, Paine says, and gives three reasons. First, we don’t know the extent of the laws of nature, and second, miracles can be faked. 

As, therefore, we know not the extent to which either nature or art can go, there is no positive criterion to determine what a miracle is, and mankind, in giving credit to appearances, under the idea of there being miracles, are subject to be continually imposed upon. 

But third, report of a miracle is simply ineffective as an inducement to belief; even supposing the miracle occurred, the very report of it invites disbelief: 

If…we see an account given of such a miracle by the person who said he saw it, it raises a question in the mind very easily decided, which is, is it more probable that nature should go out of her course, or that a man should tell a lie?…it is more difficult to obtain belief to a miracle, than to a principle evidently moral without any miracle. 

This is a restatement of Hume’s maxim on the miraculous, from An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “When anyone tells me that he saw a dead man restored to life, I immediately consider with myself whether it be more probable, that this person should either deceive or be deceived, or that the fact, which he relates, should really have happened.” Hume’s work was published in 1758 and it is hard to imagine Paine would not have known of it. Paine’s prose, as usual, is the more pungent. 

Deism 

If no prophet or scripture can be trusted, what is left? Paine said he believes in a God; where would he read the Deity’s nature? As befits an old revolutionary, his answer is at once radical, egalitarian, and liberating. 

The WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man. 

…The Creation speaketh an universal language, independently of human speech or human language…lt is an ever-existing original, which every man can read. It cannot be forged; it cannot be counterfeited; it cannot be lost; it cannot be altered; it cannot be suppressed.. In fine, do we want to know what God is? Search not the book called the Scripture, which any human hand might make, but the Scripture called the Creation. 

This is the key tenet of Deism, and the point that Paine most wanted to convey. 

At this point, Paine articulates versions of the First Cause and Design arguments for God’s existence. But he does not simply state them; he uses them as a springboard to advocate reason as the tool for religious understanding. He arrives at a conclusion that ought to make him the patron philosopher of every scientist or technologist: 

That which is now called natural philosophy, embracing the whole circle of science, of which astronomy occupies the chief place, is the study of the works of God, and of the power and wisdom of God in his works, and is the true theology. 

In a lengthy argument Paine uses the geometry of the triangle to show that “mechanics,” the practical application of science, is based on universal principles that are discovered, not invented, by man. “It is the structure of the universe that has taught this knowledge to man,” he says. But the same power of reason that enables us to discover and use the creation cannot stomach what is called theology: 

…it is certain that what is called the Christian system of faith…psi irreconcilable, not only to the divine gift of reason that God hath given to man, but to the knowledge that man gains of the power and wisdom of God, by the aid of the sciences and by studying the structure of the universe that God has made. 

It is almost eerie for a modern reader to see that phrase “the structure of the universe” used twice, clearly in the sense we use it, but in a book published in 1794. How delighted Paine would have been, if he could have watched the unfolding of modern cosmology as it discovers ever deeper and stranger aspects of the structure of the universe.

The Writing of Age of Reason 

Paine was a failure at business and marriage when he emigrated to the American colonies. The political ferment of the time awakened him to his true talent, a genius for arguing a cause. He published the pamphlet Common Sense early in 1776, and by the end of the year it had sold 150,000 copies — in a country that had a population of a few million, where all news moved by horse or sad. The pamphlet played a decisive part (says biographer Ayer) in turning public opinion toward secession and away from accommodation with England. During the war Paine published more pamphlets, the first of which begins with the famous sentence, 

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman. 

In 1787 Paine returned to England, mainly to promote his design for an iron bridge. In 1790 the conservative philosopher Edmund Burke published a criticism of the French Revolution and a defence of privilege and a stratified society. This inflamed Paine, who immediately wrote and published his greatest work, The Rights of Man, an eloquent and detailed proposal for a democratic state based on universal (male) suffrage, with no unearned privilege and with features such as salaries for legislators, public health care, public education, and old-age pensions, all to be paid for by a graduated income tax. Each of these was a novel idea at the time. 

The Rights of Man was an immediate best-seller, but was also quickly ruled “seditious libel” by the British Government. Paine fled to France just ahead of an order for his arrest. The Crown tried and convicted him in absentia, and he never set foot in England again alive. Printers who sold his book were convicted and sentenced to jail or transportation, but the book continued to sell, ultimately passing 300,000 copies. 

Meanwhile the French welcomed him, made him an honorary citizen, elected him a representative to the National Convention, and appointed him to the committee that was compiling a new constitution. But this was the beginning of the Terror, when anyone not affiliated with the cadre in power was subject to arrest at any time, and dozens were taken from cells to the guillotine every day. Later Paine would write 

The intolerant spirit of Church persecutions had transferred itself into politics; the tribunal styled revolutionary, supplied the place of an inquisition…I saw many of my most intimate friends destroyed, others daily carried to prison, and I had reason to believe, and had also intimations given to me, that the same danger was approaching myself. 

In this feverish climate Paine sat down and wrote that “It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion,” and, continuing through the arguments summarized above, concluded the first part of Age of Reason (only 68 pages) with 

…if ever a universal religion should prevail, it will not be by believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies…in the meantime, let every man follow, as he has a right to do, the religion and the worship he prefers.

The day he wrote that, guards came from the revolutionary government to arrest him. They were courteous enough to let Paine detour past the house of a friend and drop off the manuscript on the way to jail. The work was published as a pamphlet white he was in prison. 

There he stayed for eight months, never sure when he might be taken out to have his head removed. The US representative in Pads, Gouvemor Morris, was an enemy of Paine’s, and did nothing to obtain his release, while reporting to the government at home that the Revolutionary Council had refused to release him. 

When Jefferson succeeded Washington as president, he sent a new ambassador, James Monroe (himself later President). Monroe was a Paine supporter, and quickly secured Paine’s release. Paine was very ill, and spent months recuperating in Monroe’s house. But as soon as he could write, he resumed work on the second part of Age of Reason. 

Flaming the Church 

The pamphlet edition of the first part of Age of Reason had already drawn criticism. As was only to be expected, most of the rebuttals were couched in Christian terms. Perhaps this is why, in the longer second part, Paine aims less at defining Deism as a distinct belief, and focuses on the negative task of demolishing Christian doctrine, and in particular on discrediting the Bible as a reliable document. In truth, Deism is such a spartan doctrine, the few pages he spends on it are probably sufficient. Whatever his motive, Paine swings away at the Bible with a fine iconoclastic energy. 

Biographer A. J. Ayer seems to find Paine’s detailed and sarcastic deconstruction of Biblical absurdities to be somehow quaint, barely relevant “At the time that Paine wrote Age of Reason,” he explains, “the view of orthodox Christians was that the Bible was the word of God. For example, in the case of the Old Testament, it was believed that God dictated the books of the Pentateuch to Moses and the book of Samuel to Samuel, and that it was through divine inspiration that Solomon wrote his Proverbs and David his Psalms.” 

Perhaps in the rational cloisters of Oxford, where Ayer writes, such beliefs are today only historical footnotes. And in fact there are no respected biblical scholars today who think that any books of the Bible (apart from some of Paul’s epistles) were written by their eponymous authors. When Paine wrote, there was no such thing as biblical scholarship, in the sense of learned, non- sectarian, non-judgemental scrutiny of the Bible as a text. There was plenty of study of the Bible, but the scholars who undertook it always started with a deeply-held belief in the inerrancy and divine inspiration of the text — reading the Bible only to seek further evidence of its presumed perfection. 

Outside Oxford, this is frequently still the case today. Belief in the literal, word- by-word truth of the Bible is by no means dead in this country. You do not have to go far to find people who can be shocked to the core and deeply angered by an assertion that the Gospel according to Mark might not have been written by a personal companion of Jesus named Mark. And even less- fundamental Christians commonly regard the Bible with a vaguely worshipful attitude, treat it as a sanctified artefact, and think it is at least disrespectful, possibly even blasphemous, to examine its text in any critical way. 

Paine had no such qualms. He says he had not had a Bible at hand while writing the first part of his book. But his critics: 

…will now find that I have furnished myself with a Bible and a Testament; and l can say also that I have found them to be much worse books than I had conceived. If I have erred in anything in the first part of the Age of Reason, it has been in speaking better of some parts of those books than they have deserved. 

With that he sets out to examine the Bible coldly, as a text, and to point out the grosser absurdities, contradictions, and barbarities that he finds littered through it. What is refreshing about Paine’s approach is that he does not simply fulminate; nor does he appeal to science or philosophy. Any such approach would lead only to empty word-wars with the theologians. He adopts a simpler, and more deadly, approach. 

The evidence that I shall produce in this case is from the books themselves, and I shall confine myself to this evidence only. Were I to refer for proof to any of the ancient authors whom the advocates of the Bible call profane authors, they would controvert that authority, as I controvert theirs: I will therefore meet them on their own ground, and oppose them with their own weapon, the Bible. 

The Old Testament 

The first seventy-odd pages that follow are primarily devoted to demolishing the notion that any books of the Old Testament could possibly have been written by Moses or by any other character who is named in them. This is really quite evident, if you only examine the text without preconception. Paine takes the books in turn, exposing in each at least one statement that cannot be true if the book is written by its legendary author. Here are two brief examples to demonstrate his methods. Of Deuteronomy, 

After telling that Moses went to the top of Pisgah… he [the author of Deuteronomy] tells us that Moses died there in the land of Moab, and that he buried him in a valley in the land of Moab; but as there is no antecedent to the pronoun he, there is no knowing who he was that did bury him. If the writer meant that he (God) buried him, how should he (the writer) know it? or why should we (the readers) believe him? since we know not whom the writer was that tells us so, for certainly Moses could not himself tell where he was buried. 

After finishing with the Pentateuch, Paine returns to Genesis to observe verse 36:31 

“And these are the kings that reigned in Edom, before there reigned any king over the children of Israel.” [This passage] could only have been written after the first king began to reign over them; and consequently, that the book of Genesis, so far from having been written by Moses, could not have been written till the time of Saul at least…but the expression, any king, implies more kings than one…and if taken in a general sense, it carries it through all the time of the Jewish monarchy. 

And by the way, 

…this verse that I have quoted, and all the remaining verses of the 36th chapter of Genesis, are word for word in the first chapter of Chronicles, beginning at the 43rd verse. 

As indeed they are. Intrigued, I verified this and some others of Paine’s reports of contradictions and found no mistakes. For example, he later notes 

As one proof, among others I shall produce, to show the disorder In which this pretended word of God, the Bible, has been put together, and the uncertainty of who the authors were, we have only to look at the first three verses of Ezra, 

and the last two in Chronicles; for by what kind of cutting and shuffling has it been that the first three verses in Ezra should be the two last verses in Chronicles, or that the last two in Chronicles should be the first three in Ezra? Given his remarks in the first part of the book on the fallibility of any written text, he relishes finding this and other proofs of just such failings, which show 

the disorder and ignorance in which the Bible has been put together, and that the compilers of it had no authority for what they were doing, nor we any authority for believing what they have done. 

While passing through the Old Testament he reacts to some of the barbarous cruelties it celebrates. 

When we read…that they (the Israelites) came by stealth upon whole nations of people, who…had given them no offence; that they put all those nations to the sword; that they spared neither age nor infancy; that they utterly destroyed men, women, and children; that they left not a soul to breathe — expressions that are repeated over and over again…are we sure all these things are fact? are we sure that the Creator of man commissioned these things to be done? and are we sure that the books that tell us so were written by his authority? 

The New Testament 

After 75 pages of going “through the Bible, as a man would go through a wood with an axe on his shoulder, and fell trees,” Paine turns to the New Testament and in particular to the four Gospels. When he wrote, belief was that the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John were personal reportage from the pens of four of Jesus’ twelve apostles (a belief not uncommon today in some quarters, as I mentioned). It was this belief that Paine assumed and set out to undermine. He had no difficulty in seeing that 

The disordered state of the history in those four books, the silence of one book on matters related in the other, and the disagreement that is to found among them, implies that they are the production of some unconnected individuals, many years after the things that they pretend to relate, each of whom made his own legend; and not the writings of men living intimately together…in fine, that they have been manufactured, as the books of the Old Testament have been, by other persons than those whose names they bear. 

Today, non fundamentalist scholars think this is exactly the case, but it was by no means the common opinion in the 18th century. (For an accessible, readable analysis of the history and content of the Gospels, see Asimov’s Guide to the New Testament.) Paine opens his treatment of the Gospels by saying 

I lay it down as a position which cannot be controverted, that the agreement of all parts of a story does not prove the story to be true, because the parts may agree and the whole may be false; secondly, that the disagreement of the parts of a story proves the whole cannot be true. The agreement does not prove true, but the disagreement proves falsehood positively. 

This established, he notes the complete disagreement between Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies of Jesus. The first chapter of Matthew begins with giving a genealogy of Jesus Christ; and in the third chapter of Luke, there is also given a genealogy of Jesus Christ. 

Did those two agree, it would not prove the genealogy to be true…but as they contradict each other in every particular, it proves the falsehood absolutely. 

For the reader’s convenience, Paine sets out a table of the 28 generations cited by Matthew and the 43 given by Luke, so you can easily see that it is “only the two names of David and Joseph that are alike in the two lists.

“Now, if these men…set out with a falsehood between them…in the very commencement of their history…what authority…is there left for believing the strange things they tell us afterward? If they cannot be believed in their account of his natural genealogy, how are we to believe them when they tell us he was the son of God begotten by a ghost, and that an angel announced this in secret to his mother? 

And in a strange inverted prevision of Pascal’s Wager, Paine pleads 

Can any man of serious reflection hazard his future happiness upon the belief of a story naturally impossible…and related by persons already detected of falsehood? Is it not more safe that we stop ourselves at the plain, pure, and unmixed belief of one God, which is Deism, than that we commit ourselves on an ocean of improbable, irrational, indecent and contradictory tales? 

Continuing, he cites the contradictions in even the simplest matters of fact. Mark says the crucifixion was at nine in the morning, John says at noon. Each of the four books cites the written inscription supposed to be put above Christ on the cross, yet no two quote the same words. “We may infer from these circumstances, trivial as they are, that those writers, whoever they were, and in whatever time they lived, were not present at the scene.” Paine has high sarcastic fun with the apocalyptic account in Mark of events at the crucifixion (the veil in the temple rent, darkness, earthquake, graves opening) which is not corroborated by any of the other books. The books contradict each other about the events at the tomb and after. Matthew says that eleven disciples went away into Galilee, into a mountain, where they saw the resurrected Jesus. But Luke and John say the disciples were assembled in secret in Jerusalem, and Jesus appeared among them. Mark says Jesus ascended to heaven immediately after the meeting in the room; Luke says Christ led them out as far as Bethany. “Yet this is the evidence,” Paine says earlier, “and these are the books that have been imposed on the world, as being given by Divine inspiration, and as the unchangeable word of God.” 

Immortality

Leaving the Gospels, Paine turns to the epistles of Paul; and this provokes him to discuss his own thoughts on immortality. It most offends Paine that ‘the doctrine he [Paul] sets out to prove by argument is the resurrection of the same body…” 

[But] if I have already died in this body, and am raised again in the same body…it is presumptive evidence that I shall die again…The Personal powers of man are so limited, and his heavy frame so little constructed to extensive enjoyment, that there is nothing to induce us to wish the opinion of Paul to be true. 

In these words I think I can hear the voice of an ill, aging man. But this is also the first place at which Paine is less than careful in his reading of the Bible. Paul explicitly says the resurrected body is not the same tired one (1 Corinthians 15:42-44), and Luke has Jesus address the same point (Luke 20:35-8). 

Is Paine guilty of the debater’s trick of setting up a straw-man argument? No; he turns immediately to his own alternative vision of resurrection. It does not involve bodies at all, and like all Paine’s notions, it is original. Indulge me as I quote at length, as it is so original, and stands out as an oasis of constructive philosophy in a long trek of criticism. 

[The consciousness of existence is the only conceivable idea we can have of another life, and the continuance of that consciousness is immortality. The consciousness of existence, or the knowing that we exist, is not necessarily confined to the same form, nor to the same matter, even in this life. 

We have not in all cases the same form, nor in any case the same matter that composed our bodies twenty or thirty years ago; and yet we are conscious of being the same persons…[W]e know not how much, or rather how little, of our composition it is, and how exquisitely fine that little is, that creates in us this consciousness of existence; and all beyond that is like the pulp of a peach, distinct and separate from the vegetative speck in the kernel. 

Who can say by what exceedingly fine action of fine matter it is that a thought is produced in what we call the mind? and yet that thought when produced, as I now produce the thought I am writing, is capable of becoming immortal, and is the only production of man that has that capacity…[P]rint and reprint a thought a thousand times over, and that with materials of any kind…the thought is eternally and identically the same thought… if, then, the thing produced has in itself a capacity of being immortal, it is more than a token that the power that produced it, which is the self-same thing as the consciousness of existence, can be immortal also; and that as independently of the matter it was first connected with, as the thought is of the printing or writing it first appeared in…it is not more difficult to believe that we shall exist hereafter in a better state and form than at present, than that a worm should become a butterfly, and quit the dunghill for the atmosphere… 

This passage has an astounding modernity. Early in the book, Paine used “the structure of the universe” almost the way a modern cosmologist would use it. Here he comes within a hair of arguing that consciousness is a pattern or arrangement, independent of the medium on which it appears. It’s as if Paine had eavesdropped on a lecture by, say, Douglas Hofstader, 200 years in his future. 

Note, by the way, that Paine is not at all arguing for a “soul” in different words. There are profound differences between the Cartesian soul, a kind of indestructible essence attached to but separate from the body, and a pattern, or Paine’s “consciousness of existence.” A pattern can persist forever, but it cannot exist apart from a medium, and it can be disrupted and erased forever. 

Paine does not follow up his idea in any depth. He does not speculate, for example , on what medium might carry his “consciousness of existence” after the end of his body. 

Deism and Christianity 

Belatedly noting Paul’s remarks on resurrection, Paine devotes some paragraphs of heavy-handed sarcasm to them, and then finally rests his prosecution by summing up the logical bind in which his exposure of its contradictions has placed the Christian scriptures. 

The evidence I have produced to prove them forgeries is extracted from the books themselves, and acts like a two-edged sword, either way. If the evidence be denied, the authenticity of the scriptures is denied with it; for it is scripture evidence; and if the evidence be admitted, the authenticity of the books is disproved. 

In his conclusion, Paine restates the argument against revelation, and reminds the reader of the violence and barbarity recounted so approvingly in the Old Testament. 

The most detestable wickedness, the most horrid cruelties, and the greatest miseries that have afflicted the human race have had their origin in this thing called revelation, or revealed religion…the Jews made no converts, they butchered all. 

And Christians can’t claim the loving-kindness of the New Testament exonerates them, since “the ministers preach from both books.” Therefore, 

It is incumbent on every man who reveres the character of the Creator, and who wishes to lessen the catalogue of artificial miseries…to expel all ideas of revealed religion. 

Is there no good in the Bible? Only accidentally, for 

the fragments of morality that are irregularly and thinly scattered in these books…are the natural dictates of the conscience…and are nearly the same in all religions and in all societies. 

In a footnote, Paine notes Salon’s description of the most perfect government, “That where the least injury done to the meanest individual, is considered as an insult on the whole constitution,” as a precept superior to any in the New Testament. Solon, Paine carefully notes, lived about 500 years before Christ. Again he contrasts Deism to conventional religions, and incidentally shows again that he is himself no atheist. 

If we consider the nature of our condition here, we must see that there is no occasion for such a thing as revealed religion. What is it we want to know? Does not the creation, the universe we behold, preach to us the existence of an Almighty Power that governs and regulates the whole? And is not the evidence that this creation holds out to our senses infinitely stronger than anything we can read in a book that any impostor might make and call the word of God? As for morality, the knowledge of it exists in every man’s conscience. 

Yet Paine apparently recognizes that different minds must interpret the open book of Creation differently. Lacking an accepted revelation to supply a mandatory uniformity, there will be doubt But doubt is not a problem, it an absolute necessity, because 

We must know also that the power that called us into being, can, if he please, and when he pleases, call us to account for the manner in which we have lived here; and, therefore, without seeking any other motive for the belief, it is rational to believe that he will, for we know beforehand that he can. The probability or even the possibility of the thing is all that we ought to know; for if we knew it for a fact, we should be the mere slaves of terror; our belief would have no merit, and our best actions no virtue. 

It is the coercive nature of revealed religion, and its absurd complexities as compared to Deism, that makes Christianity “render the heart torpid,” he says. Always the political thinker, he never forgets the political purposes that religion can serve. 

As an engine of power, it serves the purpose of despotism; and as a means of wealth, the avarice of priests. [and later] It has been the scheme of the Christian church, and of all the other invented systems of religion, to hold man in ignorance of the Creator, as it is of Government to hold man in ignorance of his rights. The systems of the one are as false as those of the other, and are calculated for mutual support. 

In the final paragraphs Paine turns his resonant voice again to the praise of natural science. 

The Bible of the creation is inexhaustible in texts. Every part of science, whether connected with the geometry of the universe, with the systems of animal and vegetable life, or with the properties of inanimate matter, is a text as well for devotion as for philosophy—for gratitude as for human improvement. It will perhaps be said that if such a revolution in the system of religion takes place, every preacher ought to be a philosopher. Most certainly; and every house of devotion is a school of science. 

The Aftermath 

Paine finally returned to the United States in 1802. He was 65, not in good health, and in bad odor with almost everyone. However much he might have intended to promote the purity of Deism, what people remembered (or more commonly, all they heard as sensational gossip) was his attack on Christianity. The distinction between belief in a God, and hatred for the religion through which most people had received their notions of God, was entirely too fine for the average person to grasp or care about. From the moment of publication of Age of Reason Paine was an atheist in popular opinion. 

In addition, he offended powerful figures that might have been his patrons. He blamed ex-President Washington for failing to rescue him from prison; and he published a series of letters strongly attacking the Federalist party for failing to hold to the democratic principles of the American Revolution. 

Thomas Jefferson, now in office as President, still supported him, but other old friends refused to speak to him; and he was denounced from pulpits in many towns. At one point, when he tried to book a ride on a stagecoach, the owner of the line refused to carry him, apparently because one of his stages had once been struck by lightning and he didn’t want to risk it happening again. At the end of this journey, Paine and a friend were run out of Trenton by an angry mob. Friends and disciples turned enemies, either because of his “atheism” or because of personal quarrels. 

Paine died in 1809. It was his wish to be buried in a Quaker cemetery, but the Quakers denied the request. He was first interred on the outskirts of a farm he owned in New Rochelle. In a final bizarre chapter to his life, an admirer, one William Cobbett, had Paine’s corpse dug up and brought to England, where he attempted to raise money for a monument by exhibiting the corpse. This endeavour failed. After Cobbett’s estate was sold, Paine’s body passed through several hands and eventually disappeared. As Paine wrote of Moses, “There is no knowing who he was that did bury him.” 

Perhaps it is just as well. “I here close the subject,” he wrote, 

and I leave the ideas that are suggested in the conclusion of the work, to rest on the mind of the reader; certain as I am, that when opinions are free, either in matters of government or religion, truth will finally and powerfully prevail.

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Crisis Of Doubt, Honest Faith In Nineteenth-Century England. Timothy Larsen. 317pp. Hardback. OUP., 2006. ISBN 978-0-19-9287871. £60.00 

Although this is not a book about Thomas Paine, it does bring out the extent of his influence amongst members of the freethought and Secularist movement in England during the 19th century, in particular the use by them of the arguments found in his Age of Reason. However, this is incidental to the theme of the book, which is intended to demonstrate that the impact of unbelief amongst the populace was not as strong as most scholars contend. In addition, the author seeks to show that the intellectual integrity of Christianity successfully weathered the battering it had taken over the century. 

Central to the author’s case is the story of seven individuals whom he puts forward as having been leaders of the freethought movement in England, which none were, although they were with one exception prominent speakers, these were William Hone, Frederick Young, Thomas Cooper, John Gordon, John Bebbington and George Sexton. The exception is Hone who was never an active freethinker or member of any specific freethought organisation, or, for the matter a genuine unbeliever as opposed to a dabbler. In Cooper there is considerable doubt as to whether he ever gave up belief in the first place, an uncertainty reflected in what Timothy Larsen writes about him. 

Each of those named have a chapter in the book, described as “intellectual biographies”, devoted to them, but the presentation of the material is in my opinion marred too often by the author’s all too evident bias, which is understandable as he is a professional theologian whose job is to defend the belief system he subscribes to. His bias is all too evident in, for example, his remarks about a two night debate between G. W. Foote and Sexton at Batley held in Batley in 1877 on the theme of “Is Secularism the True Gospel for Mankind?” Sexton had been an able Secularist propagandist, even if he awarded himself self-created university degrees, and had at one time given an address praising Thomas Paine, though after his defection to Christianity he had little good to say of Paine. Larsen devotes a page to Sexton’s contribution to the debate in contrast to a mere two lines to that of Foote, thereby creating the impression that Sexton had come out on top, whereas anyone who actually reads the published transcript of the debate may well conclude otherwise and feel that in reality Foote had “wiped the floor” with his opponent. 

Supplementing the biographical chapters is an appendix featuring a further twenty-nine individuals which carries the heading “More Reconverts and Other Persons of Interest”. The author states by way of explanation that many of those he includes are there simply because he finds them to be persons of interest in various ways and he is not claiming all as being reconverts, nor should their inclusion be taken as an attempt on his part to co-opt them. Amongst these “persons of interest” can be found Annie Besant, Richard Carlile, Keir Hardy, Robert Owen, George Romans and A. it Wallace. Larsen writes that space limitation imposed on him by his publisher forced him to exclude several others, although in a chapter entitled “How Many Reconverts?”, he holds out to his readers the prospect of further research revealing many more. 

That the freethinkers managed to achieve as much as they did considering the odds against them is remarkable. But they could be their own worst enemy for in demonstrating that religion was of no real value in the day to day struggle for existence they caused many not simply to abandon it altogether, but to desert freethought for politics. That was the real end product of the conflict, indifference to the arguments of both sides. Nevertheless, if Crisis of Doubt can be said to have any real value it is to draw attention to a fascinating part of the nation’s social history.

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Those of a radical persuasion are unlikely to have missed the reference in Richard Dawkins’ new book The God Delusion. Dawkins points to the epithets hurled at ‘poor Tom Paine: Judas, reptile, hog, mad dog, souse, louse, archbeast, brute, liar and of course infidel’ in an age when deists were commonly seen as ‘indistinguishable from atheists’.

Although Paine’s views on religion are not yet universally accepted, and perhaps never will be, it is open to question whether my use of the term ‘radical’ remains appropriate. Leaving aside those ‘don’t know’ or who are not interested’, it may be that in Britain today thinking that was once thought of as radical has for the most part become orthodox. Despite pockets of religious fundamentalism we live in a largely secular society. 

Nonetheless, I wonder whether members of the Thomas Paine Society, in focussing upon the historical context of Paine’s life and work and associated memorabilia, are in danger of neglecting the enduring relevance of his core ideas. I am thinking in particular of his mature opinions as set out in The Age of Reason, addressed to his fellow citizens of the United States of America: a nation, paradoxically, that is now home to some of the most entrenched opponents of his views. 

In his approach to religion, I believe that Dawkins can be seen, in every aspect save one, as the lineal descendent of Paine. The exception is that Paine, despite his rejection of religious creeds and denunciation of national institutions of churches as “human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit”, remained firm in his belief in one God and a hope for happiness beyond this life. With that reservation, however, he was comprehensive in his critique of the foundations of every established religion, singling out the Jewish, Christian and Mohammedan traditions. All of them, he argued, pretended some special mission from God, communicated to certain individuals, and relied upon books claimed as the revealed word of God. But, Paine protested, revelation, when applied to religion, could only be something communicated immediately from God to man. Anything else is hearsay, or hearsay upon hearsay, that we are not obliged to believe. 

In the present climate of sensitivity surrounding criticism of Islam, it is particularly apt that Paine, as well as laying about the contrivance of the Christian tradition, was forthright in expressing his view of the origin of the Muslim faith: 

When I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven and brought to Mahomet by an angel, the account comes too near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second-hand authority as the former [the commandments of Moses]. I did not see the angel myself, and, therefore, I have a right not to believe it’.

Yet to my mind, Paine did not go far enough. Impeccably fair, he asserted that everyone has a right to their own opinion, however different that opinion might be to one’s own, and that the most formidable weapon against errors of every kind is reason. Well my reason tells me that even what is perceived as immediate, firs- hand revelation is not to be trusted. And that if there is no God, then there is no immaculate, divine revelation. Which brings me back to Richard Dawkins.

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Chris Staples went to this talk with some foreboding, as a person of left wing sympathies, I had felt alienated by Christopher Hitchens’s progression from a broadly left-wing position to that of being a high priest of the right. However, I knew that Hitchens was about to publish a new book about Thomas Paine and that his talk was to inaugurate a regular series at the annual Brighton Festival about a fascinating historical figure who spent much of his early life in the nearby town of Lewes.’ Moreover, I hoped to hear an articulate case put forward by an admirer of Paine for supporting Bush, Blair and their allies and their foreign policy. 

The best part of the talk came in the first five minutes when Hitchens projected a short poem of two verses composed by Arthur O’Connell when being sentenced for being an Irish patriot.

The pomp of courts and pride of kings

I prize above all earthly things

I love my country: the king

Above all men his praise I sing.

The royal banners are displayed

And may success the standard aid.

I fain would banish far from hence

The Rights of Man’ and ‘Common Sense’

Confused to his odious reign

That for to princes, Thomas Paine!

Defeat and ruin seize the cause

Of France, its liberties and laws!

At first sight this appears to be an attack on Paine and his doctrines but closer examination reveals a different story. 

If one reads the first line of the first verse and follows this with the first line of the second verse followed by the second line of the first verse and then the second line of the second verse and so on, its true meaning is shown. So we have:

The pomp of courts and pride of kings

I fain would banish far from hence

prize above all earthly things

The Rights of Man’ and ‘Common Sense’

etc.

After this promising start, the talk degenerated into a very generalised account of Paine’s life, which did not provide any insights, which would be new to any TPS member. Hitchens took an inordinately long time over this exercise but I hoped that the question and answer session might prove more scintillating. 

As was to be expected, most of the questions revolved around current issues and about Paine’s likely attitude to these. The answers were extremely ponderous and by the time Hitchens had finished his replies, one had almost forgotten the original question, which, when one could remember it, he had not actually answered! There were also many factual errors in his replies and snide comments about the motives of those who did not share his views. 

I will give a very few examples. When questioned by a man from Pakistan about the worldwide hatred of the USA because of its uncritical support for Israel, he countered by a long attack on Pakistan. When asked about the injustice meted out to the Palestinians, he grudgingly accepted that they did have some grievances but the reply was mainly an attack on Bin Laden. It failed to answer the accusation that the suffering of the Palestinians has increased Bin Laden’s following dramatically, a connection which Paine would surely have made. It would be perfectly fair to attack Bin Laden — how one wishes Bush had taken him seriously before 9/11 and, indeed, after that grotesque event instead of being sidelined into adventures in Iraq. 

Hitchens criticised Bin Laden again for opposing the independence of East Timor from predominantly Muslim Indonesia. He appeared to be ignorant of the fact (or chose not to mention it) that US President Ford and Secretary of State Kissinger had given the green light to the Indonesian dictator, Suharto, to take over that unhappy country in 1975. This, of course. brought about the deaths of at least 100,000 of its population and probably more so. Had Ford and Kissinger not made this recently revealed, though long suspected, deal, East Timor would never have become part of a Muslim state in the first place.

Islam itself was dubbed as merely an Arab tribal religion, ignoring the fact that the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not Arabs. Those who opposed the violence of attacking Iraq were branded as supporting the violence of the insurrection in that unhappy country. He was pleased that the USA now attacked dictators like Saddam rather than democrats like Allende of Chile. I suppose this IS progress of a sort! Of course no mention was made of the fact that the USA had supported Saddam for a very long period. There was no mention, naturally, of strategic oil. He alleged that British support for the war in Iraq is something to be proud of and he prophesied that we would all reap the benefits of this. This seems an extraordinary view for an alleged Paineite. It seems certain that Pain would have attempted to understand the CAUSES of ‘terror’ in the world today and would have been horrified to see the role being played by his adopted country. 

Hitches may be a polemical writer but, judging by this performance, is certainly not an effective public speaker, except that his inordinately long and ponderous replies to questions, a technique perfected by many politicians, makes it difficult to challenge his highly controversial views I shall be interested to read review of his forthcoming book on Paine but I am unlikely to read it myself and will certainly not be adding it to my fairly large collection of works by and about Thomas Paine.

1. Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, A Biography. London, Atlantic Cooks, 2006. Reviewed in News Briefing 37. P.9.

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In June, 1797 an impoverished bookseller by the name of Thomas Williams was charged with blasphemy for having sold a single copy of Paine’s Age of Reason, the prosecution having been initiated by an organisation with the grand title of the Society for Enforcing the King’s Proclamation against Immorality and Profaneness, better known by its critics as the Vice Society. Its president was one Beilby Porteus, the son of a retired Virginian plantation owner, and bishop of London, while its committee included two other Anglican bishops, several members of the nobility, a general and several members of Parliament who included William Wilberforce, later celebrated for opposition to slavery, except for workers in English factories.

According to Robert Hodgson’s Life of the Right Reverend Beilby Porteus, D.D. (1811). ft was under his “active and discreet direction (that) the licentiousness of the Metropolis had to a certain degree been checked”, but then “a publication of such an infamous description, and calculated to produce such infinite mischief… made its appearance, and was disseminated with inconceivable industry through every town and village in the kingdom”. The offending publication was Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason (p.125).

The Vice Society was outraged, in their opinion the book was “in point of argument …. perfectly contemptible, but what was worse, in the view of Porteus was that “it was addressed to the multitude, and most dexterously brought down to the level of their understanding. It compressed the whole poison of infidelity into the narrow compass of an essence or extract, and rendered irreligion easy to the meanest capacity.” In other words, it was easy to read, as indeed it was and is. 

The indignant bishop thus wanted progress of the work “checked instantly”, and while it was thought that bishop Richard Watson’s “antidote” (Apology for the Bible) was “admirable”, it is clear from what Hodgson writes that it was thought ineffectual. 

It was thus decided that the man who had dared, in violation of all decency” to publish Paine’s book should have inflicted on him some signal punishment”, a statement that infers the outcome of the case had been decided in advance. So it was that Thomas Williams was prosecuted at the court of the King’s Bench, Porteus and a colleague, the bishop of Durham, having prevailed on Thomas Erskine (who had defended Paine when he was tried for seditious libel) to prosecute on behalf of the Vice Society. Williams could not afford a defence so the outcome was inevitable, the outcome being inevitable and, as Hodgson states, “the Jury without a moment’s hesitation” found him guilty. Throughout the case the judge, Lord Kenyon, made no secret of his support for the prosecution and openly showed his bias along with his support for the society. 

However, prior to the sentencing of Williams, Erskine was enticed into visiting Williams’s shop and what he saw there horrified him, Williams’s wife and their three children, two of whom had smallpox, were destitute and starving. As a consequence of this at a full committee meeting of the society presided over by Porteus with two other bishops present and Wilberforce, which was held before Williams was due to be sentenced, Erskine described the situation the family was in and appealed to the committee to be lenient and allow him to plead for a nominal sentence, pointing out that mercy was “a grand characteristic of the Christian religion” and suggesting the society should be well satisfied with the punishment already inflicted on Williams, who had been in prison some time awaiting sentence. But the saintly Porteus (as Hodgson represents him) and the others present, were inflexible, not for them compassion or mercy. Disgusted at their stance Erskine refused to accept his fee and refused to anything further to do with the case, a fact Hodgson omits to mention in his book, where instead he praises Erskine’s presentation of the prosecution’s case. Williams was sentenced to a year in prison plus his own recognisance for £1,000. 

It thus comes as no surprise to discover that Porteus supported negro slavery, making this all too clear in a lecture he gave before the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in 1784 and later published as An Essay Towards a Plan for the more effectual Civilization and Conversion of the Negro Slaves on the Trust Estate in Barbadoes (London, 1807). The estate, or plantation, was “stocked” (Porteus’s own expression) with 300 slaves plus their innumerable slave children, and in his address the bishop was primarily concerned with how to coerce the slaves into becoming Christians, thereby “rendering them industrious, honest, sober, faithful, and obedient to their masters, as they are expressly enjoined to be in Scripture, under pain of eternal punishment in the world to come”, which would “in a great degree remove the necessity of the whip”, and secondly increasing the plantation’s profitability by reducing costs. Something that has a rather modern ring to it. 

He advanced several proposals that included compelling the slaves to undertake additional Christian propaganda on. Sundays, a day they looked upon as their own, designed to make them more submissive, but allowing them an extra hour off on another day. He appreciates that this might appear to have a detrimental effect on profitability, but this would be minimal, indeed it might even have the opposite effect. However, it seems that the slaves were resistant to the attempts at conversion, so Porteus called for attention to be concentrated on their children, who should be, he maintained, placed under the charge of a catechist “as soon as they are capable of articulating their words, and their instruction must be pursued with unremitting vigour”, but only until they were too young to work, for as they grow fit to labour”, their attendance, “must gradually lessen, till at length they take their full share of work with the grown Negroes”. Here he was saying that profits’ came before Christianity, a familiar stance amongst Christian prelates throughout history and still conspicuous today. 

To assist in the task of conversion, Porteus wanted the plantation’s slaves to have as little contact with those from other plantations where owners had little interest in conversion. In addition, contamination with heathen ideas brought in by newly imported slaves from Africa was to be avoided, for it was “always extremely difficult to make any religious impressions” on their minds. Instead, Instead, he suggests, giving “every possible encouragement” should be given to “the increase of the native Negroes”, which could be done by granting “certain privileges and indulgences to those Negresses, who have large families; and if there are any who have brought up decently and creditably an unusual number of robust and healthy children” they could be given their freedom, presumably, though this is not stated, after they had reached an age when having children would have been difficult. There would thus be “a constant succession of home-born Negroes” and, throwing altruism to the wind, not that it was ever there, this would ensure the slaves owners would “reap many substantial. advantages”, not the least of which would be to “save the heavy expense of frequent purchases” involved in re-stocking. Moreover, Creole slaves were “far superior in fidelity, obedience, docility, and industry to the African Negroes”, and “young Negroes will be much more easily trained up in the Christian faith than. those who come full grown from the coast of Guinea… Porteus could as well have been writing of cattle. 

The bishop makes not the slightest reference to freeing the youngsters from slavery, but simply held the carrot of possible freedom to their mothers providing they produced children like rabbits. How the mothers would have felt on seeing their husbands and children remain in servitude was a matter the bishop did not address, but he did suggest that some Negroes who “distinguish themselves by a superior knowledge or more uniform practice of Christianity”, for which they “might be rewarded with the privilege of gradually working out their freedom” (his emphasis), but aware of the “apprehensions” this might create, for it could be looked upon as having a detrimental effect on “the produce of the plantations, by lessening the number of slaves”, he suggests “the privilege might be restricted to a very few in a certain number of years”, while their places would be taken by the “natural increase” of the Negroes, by which one assumes he had in mind the breeding programme he had earlier argued for. Moreover, the “enfranchised should be obliged to continue for a stated time, as day labourers on the plantation, at a certain stipulated price”, and by thus creating by degrees “a new race of free hardy labourers, who had been brought up in habits of industry, and accustomed to the heat of the climate (who) would do more work in less time, and at a much less expence (sic) to the society than any equal number of slaves”. In short, slavery under another name, and when eventually the English government abolished slavery in territories under its control, and massively compensated the slave owners, but the lot of the former slaves who were theoretically free remained the same, the masters became employers with poverty replacing the whip as the means of making the former slaves work even harder but at far less expense to the plantation owners.

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The Eric Paine Memorial Lecture for 2004

The writings, thoughts and indeed the eventful life of Thomas Paine regularly leaves an indelible mark upon a significant number of us who have lived after him. He challenges and excites the receptive just as much as he can infuriate those who have already made their minds up about the things Thomas Paine chose to criticise. My first encounter with the name and ideas of Thomas Paine occurred in a secondary school history lesson in which those present heard that an Englishman had gone dramatically out on a limb to defend the ideas of freedom embodied by the French Revolution. Moreover, he had done so in a text entitled Rights of Man, a title to stir the emotions and blood of any early adolescent. However discovering and investigating the legacy of Thomas Paine, even at the rudimentary level of youthful exuberance, was also an important moment for me in entering a dialogue with the conflicting identities I had been bequeathed. Just as Paine argued, as I was later to discover, no generation had a right to determine the choices of a future one so I felt able to question my own inheritance or at least to look at it more critically. 

Growing up simultaneously with Irish and English influences could certainly have led to some stark choices. Paine’s good (common?) sense and pithy dislike of humbug was, for me, an enabling intellectual strategy. It clearly helped me to transcend the archaic triumphalism of an English identity that was about to go into a rapid irretrievable tailspin. However, disdain of humbug was equally valuable in transcending the dangers of ghettoised identity that Irish nationalist sympathy might have led me into. The world is my country and to do good my religion’ was a forceful motto to carry around in late seventies and early 1980s London, A London which as we know witnessed conflict, violence and social being without doubt ‘a time to try men’s souls’. 

I was fortunate enough to attend university in England, in the last gasp of a properly funded, enabling education system which valued knowledge and personal enrichment as unequivocal social goods with potential benefits for all. In studying history and (for me) the 19th century, in which most things of importance seemed to happen, Paine became indispensable. He and his works were valuable companions to my undergraduate study both of radicalism and 19th century literature. These henceforth became a constant companion for me in my studies and writing of 19th century history. This is, in its way, indicative of a time in which my studies responded to the consequences of an historical moment. My tutors, almost to a man and woman, had been through the flowering of leftward inspired social history. Raymond Williams and E. P. Thompson had left indelible imprints upon all who had lived through the academia of these years. Even those sceptical; and even downright hostile to such developments could clearly not ignore the fact that they were happening. In those years in academia, if you wanted to, you could trace the impact of Paine upon the thousands of people who were the source and raw material of history from below. For the self educated artisan whose consciousness filled riot and corresponding society alike Blake had been an exemplar poet whilst Paine was the ultimate consummate politician. This became cast as the newly recovered contribution of the English to the broader culture of the European left. 

Nonetheless, Thomas Paine and his influence did conflict with other agendas. When I studied the chartist movement and the radicalism surrounding it Paine was cast as a crucial part of the older, outmoded ideological emphasis. Paine’s creation of ‘did Corruption’ was cast as a regency hangover, which owed perhaps too much to eighteenth century Whiggery and anachronistic conceptions of duty and worth. Paine above all others would concede that mankind appreciates ideas, even old ones, through the history of experiences. Creating and praising the productive classes in the early 1980s made Paine sound uncomfortably poujadist and far too close to the mutterings of the Grantham grocer’s daughter for comfort. This attitude was readily contrasted with the economic agenda and analysis in radicalism that had been advocated not primarily by Thomas Paine but by Thomas Spence and Robert Owen. Owen, in particular for those who felt more comfortable with Marxism, could be portrayed as the man who simultaneously invented the labour theory of value, created the language of anti-capitalist denunciation, yet also disdained politics as an unnecessary distraction.

My immersion in this exciting and rewarding world took me into postgraduate study in which I reconnected with radicalism and most importantly rediscovered one of its most underrated, yet endearing qualities — indignation. Owen was an alarmingly cold-fish in comparison to Paine. He assured all who heard him that he alone had the answer to society’s ills and began to speak the language of inevitability which Marxists would later adopt as their own. This lineage undoubtedly had a history but it certainly did not deserve the liberty to overwrite political radicalism that some allowed it. Indignation had been central to the motivation of this earlier political lineage and this was a valuable emotion which Paine contained in abundance. An emotion which he successfully trickled through the whole of the nineteenth century popular politics. So Paine and indignation had been a constant companion to my studies of Radicalism, Chartism, Secularism, Blasphemy and Republicanism. He remains valuable to all of us who would venture into those worlds in search of historical and ideological explanations of how society developed during these crucially turbulent years. 

So why is he so useful? Why has Paine been a constant companion and why should he be.afforded quite such importance? We are already, by now, familiar with a conventional ideological history. However I would like to take us down some of the less obvious ways in which Paine is a companion to English history and — let me say a founder and proponent of the public interest and opinion as key concepts that make us modern. It is not simply a question of Thomas. Paine being ideologically valuable, he was also a radical who learned the important lesson that publicity and the skilled use of the media was essential to the successful reception of one’s message. Paine was an endlessly pithy and articulate critic. For a historian wanting to write the history of radicalism through these years Paine endlessly creates and inspires public pronouncement — even after his death. Paine was also the definitive user of the decisive moment, calculating the value of what he said and appreciating the importance of when he said it. He was the first to understand the nature of revolution and the first modem to understand the nature and potential magnitude of political change. 

He also understood that the first way to change things is to think them into being different — to imagine and use ‘mental strength’ (a phrase frequently used by 19th century radicals) to transcend the status quo. After all, it was Thomas Paine who showed the resonant power of thought and its publicity through his invention of the global village. No idea ever moved around the globe so fast as revolution in the name of reason. As a historian I could spend the rest of my life tracing the radical ripples from the huge pebble that was Thomas Paine. But his value also lies elsewhere. He is also a voice I sometimes hear when I am trying to evaluate our radical history alongside some of its personalities and byways. But there are also things that are essential about Paine’s work and contribution that made the entire phenomenon of the 19th century radicalism possible. Paine and his ideas have an enormous presence in their own right in this world and these clearly deserve to be studied. But also importantly for me, he sometimes acts as a companion and a prism through which to view the phenomena one encounters as a historian in this era. 

Ironically for someone who despised inheritance we need and deserve to look at what Paine inherited that is useful to us. Edward Thompson, in his last (posthumously published) work Witness against the Beast, tried to show how William Blake learned religious dissidence from his Muggletonian mother. We might similarly ask what did Paine take from Quakerism? The Quakers had once been extraordinarily radical and had been numbered amongst the dangerous sectaries of the English Revolution. They refused to accept what they regularly saw as spurious authority and refused (literally) to doff their hats to it and similarly refused to swear oaths to do things they deemed unworthy. In doing so they nurtured a culture of sober, considered yet determined resistance. Moreover, the Quakers through their actions in both England and the New World got themselves into trouble through their insistence upon the necessity of converting an unregenerate world. For these dedicated sectaries actions spoke emphatically as loudly as words ever did. Above ail, Quakers were moved by the spirit within them to pronounce and denounce. Quakerism was about speaking the mind and soul. Now obviously we know that Paine rejected Christianity in its remotely organised forms but some of those traits from Quakerism he arguably retained. Through his indulgence of some of these he gave radicalism in Britain the means and confidence to speak. Radicalism was to have opinions for itself, and to have no compunction about publicising these no matter how awkward and unpopular they might prove and no matter where such sentiments might lead the speakers.

Paine also provided the ‘ways and means’ for others to form and communicate their opinions. He was lucky enough to be regularly published and republished whilst continually exposing his readers (even posthumously) to the endless exciting possibilities of print culture. The danger for us is to see such developments as natural components of the modern world. Or worse to underestimate them or even consider them to be mundane. We should always remember the enlightenment world this torrent burst upon. It was a world where philosophical societies throughout the land craved information and acquired the urge to experiment and derive knowledge about a universe freed from the cant and prescription of protected knowledge. Corresponding societies and societies for constitutional information were more than mere focus groups. Provincial societies like these were places where the science of electricity would be discussed one evening to be followed the very next by the sciences of man and his interactions – in other words politics. 

Paine also wrote in a linguistically liberating language. Not only did he expose the possibilities of print culture he also innovated in his – use of it. Many scholars have noted how his literary style was a break from the past – putting aside the classical allusions (we might say in unison with his audience illusions) to adopt and promote plain speaking and writing. He attacked Bastilles of the word and Palaces of the imagination. Being in awe of language and spurious unearned nobility not only cheated us of our humanity it also cheapened and demoralised our lives turning them into mere enslaved existences. Bastilles of the mind and Palaces of the imagination, these ideas are potent and have not been purged from contemporary life, never mind our history, and we will have cause to visit them later. 

Again, for Paine, this innovative and immediate language was about creating the decisive moment although as we also know at times he could also lose the plot. Like most figures his ability to produce material that was memorable – when he could do it was what people would remember him by. The value of Paine’s language would extend beyond the simple and didactic into producing the endlessly quotable epithet. His image of the ‘plumage and the dying bird’ resonates throughout the radical world but the lack of reverence he showed for even the institution of accepted British history is also informative and demonstrates how irreverence had a purpose. Paine’s forthright language could be seen as a form of blasphemy upon the sacred cow of conventional British history. If the power of blasphemy lies in the power to remove the sting from revered institutions then Paine could do this with his waspish version of history. Could his contemporaries (and can we) ever take the Norman Conquest (or even most of aristocratic history from above) seriously again without conjuring to mind the scornful phrase ‘The Armed Banditti’? 

Thus for me, Thomas Paine has been a companion on a journey through 19th century radicalism and the language attached to this. He comes into his own when examining the history of the unstamped press in the 1830’s. Those daring and courageous individuals who took indignation onto the streets to sell unstamped newspapers in defiance of authority. They took such struggles into the court room and thence to prison only to come out and sell such papers again. Paine here reminds us of the duty to communicate, the value of such communication and also of the fear that authority would always possess about these issues. 

In thinking about Chartism Paine is perhaps of little help in looking at the mass movement and the demagoguery of Fergus O’Connor. He is of more assistance in assessing the value and achievements of James Bronterre O’Brien — the man with more credentials than most to lay claim to the title of the English Robespierre. Paine is of most use however in assessing the contributions and achievements of William Lovett and John Collins, the individuals who found themselves in prison after the Bull Ring riots of 1839. These men took a long hard look at what Chartism had achieved- for them as individuals and the cause of the working classes. They asked themselves some frank questions. Where had anarchy and mass protest got us and why they had not realised the potential of the radical mass platform? Rapidly these men realised that Chartism needed to rethink its strategy and ultimately to make some harsh decisions about what it was trying to achieve. They found themselves arguing that the working classes had not achieved their aims because they appeared raw and debased in the eyes and minds of their rulers. Thus their task was to raise expectations and standards through ‘Education Chartism’, ‘Temperance Chartism’ and ‘Christian Chartism’. This was communicated in their publication ‘Charitism a New Move’. Whilst Paine might not have liked the last of these all of them were species of self-help and enabling strategies that were taking and establishing rights for the individual, even if only within their own environment.

However, this is not to say that Thomas Paine is not a useful companion to have at your side when examining some of the set piece moments of the Chartist era. It is possible to hear him in one’s ear when scrutinising the events of the 1842 Chartist petition and its presentation to parliament. In presenting the petition the chartists believed parliament would see the justice of their cause and produce actions that would rectify the damage that had been done. However they reckoned without the Tory Thomas Macaulay, who rallied to protect the vested interests of those who had property to defend. In refuting the requests of the chartists, albeit in the kindest possible way, Macaulay outlined the manifesto of the conservatives with vested interests who have ever thought about the issue from that day to this: 

…I believe that universal suffrage would be fatal to all purposes for which government exists,. and for which aristocracies and all other things exist, and that it is utterly incompatible with the very existence of civilisation. I am firmly convinced that the effect of any such measure would not merely to overthrow those institutions which now exist, and to ruin those who are rich, but to make the poor poorer, and the amount of misery of the country even greater, than it is now represented to be… No one can say that such a spoliation of property as these petitioners point at would be a relief to the evils of which they complain, and I believe that no one would deny that it would be a great addition to the mischief which is supposed to be removed. But if such would be the result, why should such power be conferred upon the petitioners? That they should ask for it is not blameable; but on what principle is it that we, knowing their views are entirely delusive, should put into their hands the irresistible power of doing all this evil to us and to themselves? 

Now is it possible that, according to the principles of human nature, if you give them this power, it would not be used to its fullest extent? There has been a constant and systematic attempt for years to represent the Government as being able to do, and as bound to attempt that which no Govermment ever attempted; and instead of the Govenunent being represented, as is the truth, as being supported by the people, it been treated as if the Government possessed some mine of wealth, some extraordinary means of supplying the wants of the people – as if they could give them bread from the clouds, water from the rocks to increase the bread and the fishes five thousand fold. Is it possible to believe that the moment you give them absolute, supreme, irresistible power, they will forget all this? You propose to give them supreme power; in every constituent body throughout the empire capital and accumulated property is to be placed absolutely at the foot of labour. How is it possible to doubt what the result will be?’

Certainly it is possible to analyse the language here and as a historian to see that it embodies many well understood conceptions of eighteenth century government. But how should we get into the mind of the chartists whose claims and questions are to be consigned to oblivion by this answer? The language of indignation taught to them through a generation of unstamped papers and through their own paper the Northern Star must have made them equally able to hear Thomas Paine’s voice clearly. In this incident they would have heard him telling them in no uncertain terms that such language is not the defence of legitimately earned property but the defence of vested interests. Moreover, he would have asked the chartists to think long and hard about the condescension being offered to them. Such dismissive attitudes argue ordinary men and women are not discriminating, are capable of theoretical thought and indeed are spurned as a mob and populace or still worse Edmund Burke’s swinish multitude_ Paine would have asked bluntly whether parliament had bothered to read properly the Chartist Petition with any level of discrimination. Paine would argue that the quest for Annual Parliaments and the . payment of M.P’s made central authority more accountable. In the words of the petition, the role of an M.P. is a great and responsible position taking office ‘When called upon to undertake the ‘important business of the country’. This is Paine’s own language about sharing power, taking responsibility for government and considering it a great (the greatest) calling. 

If we move to study the great radical autodidacts of the 19th century Paine is again supremely valuable. He reminds us of the uses of the scowling crustiness and disdain for easy solutions that so characterised these people. Moreover, his work to demystify language was turned into a life’s work for many who clearly saw the social and political power inherent in education — particularly if it was self realised. This was also the gospel of self-help in action showcasing the power of individual accomplishment to reaffirm that making the most of life was worth the effort. 

Examining the radical history around another of my research subjects — blasphemy – will rapidly convince anyone that Paine stands as a colossus. He provides the foundation text which is prosecuted endlessly by the authorities — The Age of Reason (a volume still producing converts to rationalism as late as the 1950s). Once again Paine is a good companion in this territory. We can feel him alongside Daniel Isaac Eaton and the defenceless shopmen brought before the bench who in this instance resemble clearly Blake’s imposing tyrannical figure of Steelyard the Law Giver. However, it is also possible to feel Paine wincing alongside Richard Cattle as he embarks upon an exhaustive complete reading of The Age of Reason in the court room. But nonetheless Paine (as we do) would take some time to admire the fortitude of a man who would spend years of his life in prison and would regularly quote Diderot’s epithet about strangling the last king with the entrails of the last priest. 

Paine might have chided J.S.MiII for being too polite in On Liberty for his denunciation of the prosecution for blasphemy of the insane individual Thomas Pooley in 1857 which really cried out for more in the way of indignation. But more importantly still Paine’s.culture of speaking out influenced those who would blaspheme. To blaspheme was emphatically to speak out, to venture the unpopular opinion and not be afraid of retribution and its consequences whether it emanated from this world or the next. Moreover, it was a call to feel and admit within your very self that the spurious must be questioned even unto your last breath. Importantly, the introduction of fun and ribaldry into blasphemy in the 1880s had an important cultural purpose — to argue we should not take power seriously any more. This was the colossal achievement of the enlightenment no matter what the suspicious post modem theorists would say. Paine’s favourite blasphemy might well have been Python’s Life of Brian. Not because it was particularly erudite but because it was mainstream and popular and touched thousands. It was perpetrated by public figures with cult influence especially amongst the young. Christian doctrine might summon to the mind comic images as easily as sacred ones. Paine argued that the sovereignty of this opinion was paramount — preserving it and offering it to others — after all was how revolutions began — a global village is, after all, one that talks and shares values. 

Looking at the British Empire also provides fertile ground for the implications of Paine’s culture of questioning and indignation. To radicals it was a system of oppression — but one changed by the application of opinion and holding this up to the measure of a civilised nation. Imperialism had, for radicals, originated in aristocratic tendencies and provided the playground for the worst tendencies of the ‘armed banditti’ let loose on a defenceless population. Paine’s ideological heir Charles Bradlaugh carried on the fight against such practices becoming the unofficial parliamentary ‘Member for India’ in the 1880s in succession to the radical Henry Fawcett. He fought jobbery, flunkeyism and attacks on the indigenous desire to govern and participate. Bradlaugh’s own visit to India in the 1880s, enabled him to envisage a risen people casting aside gods and princes in equal measure to embrace the enlightenment and reason. This dream was dashed for this generation by the growth of separatism and factionalism which moved Indian nationalism away from liberal, radical and rational solutions to the problem of government. 

However, it is really, paradoxically in the realm of republicanism where Thomas Paine’s influence is really not appreciated and perhaps a significant chunk of my own work has veered towards demonstrating a different history of republicanism in Britain. Paine’s feelings on monarchy and the cultural power it wielded are often resurrected and often quoted. He communicates this in an obviously celebrated phrase that has profoundly affected the history and historiography of republicanism. 

‘I have always considered monarchy to be a silly, contemptible thing. I ) compare it to something kept behind a curtain, about which there’s a great deal of bustle and fuss, and a wonderful air of seeming solemnity, but when, by any accident, the curtain happens to open, and the company sees what it is, they burst into laughter’. 

This is a wonderfully cinematic image and like any cinematic image, we tend to view it from one camera angle. Our instinct is to feel ourselves a part of the audience. Paine would argue we are encouraged to look at the contemptible show and see a mixture of bombastic over the top ham performances. He would also draw our attention to the sight of some who have trouble with their lines and others who try not to be in the performance at all. It would also not escape his eye that some cast members appear merely interested in their press notices. Whilst laughter is generated in radical circles by this the laughter fades and Paine would solemnly note that a new generation of indifferent performers and performances replaces the old. This particular reading of the English republican legacy is traditionally how history has seen English republicanism. It is deemed a failure because we are still supposedly enthralled by the performance and will continue to watch it even if farce follows tragedy in the way Marx argued it would. No matter how much we as a nation allegedly lose respect we are nonetheless dismissed as addicted to the show.

But my own investigations into republicanism suggest our cinematic angle is wrong and Thomas Paine’s contribution is wider than simple invective. Paine intended us to focus on what the audience think — to watch for changes — and to make this audience progressively more discriminating. This was to be accomplished by the generation of opinion early on. From the spectacle of George IV’s funeral cortege being pelted with excrement through the accession of William IV (a man dull people called dull), monarchy had scarcely distinguished itself in the nineteenth century. But Victoria however became the middle class darling. In response to this English Republicanism set about undoing the special relationship to make the middle classes feel uneasy about this new alliance. In doing this they drew on everything Thomas Paine told them about how new societies would operate. They would foster and promote talent, industry, attainment and merit. They would, in short, be enabling and have a lively and healthy public sphere which would enshrine the demonstration of virtue. English Republicans did not have to overthrow the monarchy but to show how it was the enemy of all these things. They hoped it would go quietly under the urging of parliament and civil society. 

Monarchy was expensive – an intrinsic message of Charles Bradlaugh’s Impeachment of the House of Brunswick. Moreover, its benefits were extended only graciously and were in the end arbitrary. The benefits of local government existed only as long as monarchy’s charters were honoured; what had been graciously bestowed could be cynically withdrawn. Besides, monarchy’s attachment to the middle classes was fleeting and dramatically went into freefall with the death of Prince Albert. Victoria neglected her public duties; her ‘friendship’ with John Brown provoked adverse comment whilst her attempts to massage the royal finances were an embarrassment to the government. The last discovery allowed opponents to argue that the monarchy was crooked — a real fear for the Victorian middle classes who came to view fraud as the cardinal sin. 

Honour was scarcely satisfied by the succeeding generation since the Prince of Wales was shown to be deeply in debt. His less than distinguished performance in the Mordaunt divorce scandal and accusations he had perjured himself in court showed monarchy riding roughshod over civil society. Republicans openly asked the people what they thought of this and the answer came from monarchy — it would remake itself. We in turn should ask ourselves why such a move was necessary if the institution was so prosperous. Ultimately monarchy was made into an institution and it has been in this straight jacket ever since. We can judge it on these criteria and assess its usefulness. In doing so we have acquired discretion, powers of evaluation and nobility of reason Paine wanted us all to have. He would have argued that it is the duty of succeeding generations to look into the eyes of other members of this audience and make them tired of even laughing at the show. 

Paine has gained new relevance from some political scholars who have suggested that with the eclipse of socialism the radical agenda is up for grabs. If this is true it may be that we are living through a period in which ideology is becoming malleable. Not in some post-modernist flabby way but in asking individuals to draw upon their human resources and their own conceptions of worth and rights. This raw power can challenge governments and multinationals as effectively as older socialist critiques. Perhaps this should also be an occasion to re-examine the legacy of liberalism that came down to us shorn of at least some of its indignation. It should persuade us to look at how liberalism became polite and lost its potency. John Stewart Mill, when he stood for parliament, refused to canvas for votes assuming that right would triumph in the hearts, or more correctly, the minds of men. Would Thomas Paine have taken such an eventuality for chance? The polite New- Liberalism of John Robertson argued that the empire should be dispensed with because it was an uncivilised burden. Paine would have used stronger language than this and would have echoed Bradlaugh’s more strident criticism which saw republican virtue as the cause that would save the unfortunate peoples of an exploitative aristocratic empire. 

But the work of indignation is never complete. Paine and his ideological descendents like Charles Bradlaugh taught us that whilst the ignoble elements of human awe and the debasing effects of charisma could still do their work we should never be free. Our duty (in their eyes) was to become discriminating. To tear down, even if only in our own minds, the pedestals that envy, superstition and tawdry admiration had erected before our eyes.

But to come full circle, the issue of enabling people and how privilege was a blight on this was emphasised by two events occurring during my own lifetime at either end of the 1960s. The first of these was the expansion of the universities in which talent rather than the ability or means to pay merit an important social force. This waged, at least for a time, what war it could on the bastilles of the word and of the mind. This gave us social history and history from below — forces empowering and inspiring talent. When the opportunities were closed down we subsequently acquired postmodernism with its attendant obfuscation, cleverness and elitism — our worst Bastille of the mind! 

The second event was the Aberfan mine disaster and its appalling aftermath. This latter event prompted the radical songwriter Leon Rosselson to write his driven and scathing attack upon privilege and the destruction of opportunity ‘Palaces of Gold’. It is no coincidence here that palaces were the enemies of the republic of opinion and of merit and our finest instincts. 

The last verse reads as an indictment of accepting the condemnation of a previous generation and the failure to enable us all!

“I’m not suggesting any kind of plot,

Everyone knows there’s not,

But you unborn millions might like to be warned

That if you don’t’ want to be buried alive by slag heaps.

Pitfalls and damp walls and rat traps and dead streets,

Arrange to be democratically born

The son of a company director

Or a judge’s fine and private daughter.

Buttons will be press,

Rules will be broken.

Strings will be pulled

And magic words spoken.

Invisible fingers will mould

Palaces of God.”

We all owe Thomas Paine for giving us and helping us to retain our indignation, may it remain and grow ever more righteous as time passes. AMEN!

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Reading Dr. O’Brien’s article on The Age of Reason in the last issue of The Bulletin reminded me of the reaction of so many people when the essay first appeared. Although it contained ideas familiar to the world of scholarship these ideas had not in general filtered down to the average clergyman or most lay Christians, hence their horror at encountering such heretical ideas. Dr. O’Brien is, as his important study of Burke, Priestley and Paine, Debate Aborted (Pentland Press, 1996) illustrates, very familiar with Paine’s radical politics, which he supports, but he appears to have been shaken at encountering Paine’s theological ideas, describing some as “off-the-cuff comments” which are “intemperate and highly offensive to sincere Christians”. I cannot think of a single sentence in either part of The Age of Reason which can be so described. That Paine did not mince his words and spoke out clearly I would agree, but he deliberately sought not to give offence and unless Dr. O’Brien is contending that those Christians who do not feel as he does are insincere, then he has to grasp the stark fact that many who are as sincere in their opinions as he is in his differ fundamentally with him. As an example I cite the comments of the late Rev. Dr. J.M. Connell: 

“As an argument for the existence and goodness of God, and a call to worship Him as He reveals Himself in the wonder and beauty of the universe, The Age of Reason is of first-rate importance in the literature of the subject. But it strikes us, at first sight, so strange and unpardonable that Paine should set aside the greatest religious book in the world as a thing of no account. For this treatment of the Bible, however, the responsibility lay rather with those who made exaggerated claims for the Bible, and sought to enforce them with all the authority at their command. The Bible was held by practically every religious denomination as the infallible Word of God, from its first page to its last. It was this claim that Thomas Paine set out to shatter, and he did so most effectively. Had the Bible been regarded, as to a large extent it is now, as containing elements human and divine, the errors of men as well as the truths of God, the likelihood is that The Age of Reason would never have been written. But Paine can hardly be blamed for not being more a man before his time than he was, and for treating the Bible from the then common point of view, and for showing that the claim that was made for it could not be justified at the bar of reason and conscience. He accomplished a rough but very necessary pioneer work… he certainly destroyed more stubborn fallacies, and the Bible is no worse for that, all the better indeed’ (Thomas Paine, A Pioneer of Democracy. Longmans Green & Co., 1939. pp.38-39). 

Although he may not have realised it, Thomas Paine was a product of the Enlightenment, having through his friendship with many leading thinkers absorbed much of the advanced thinking it had produced and continued to. Many of these ideas ran directly counter to popular Christian ideas about their cult, as the theologian, Marcus J. Borg has noted, for “more than a millennium before the Enlightenment, the Gospels and the Bible as a whole had been understood as divine documents, whose truth was guaranteed by God. Therefore, it was taken for granted that the history they reported was guaranteed by God. Therefore, it also taken for granted that the history they reported had happened as recorded. It was simply assumed that Jesus as a historical figure was the sum total of everything said about him in early Christian tradition”. (Profiles in Scholarly Courage, Early Days of New Testament Criticism’. Bible Review] 0.5.1994. p.45). 

There is no disputing that Paine challenged this belief, but he was far from being alone in this. When he presents Jesus as being no more than a man, or that the author of the Pentateuch was not Moses, he was saying no more than H.S. Reimarus (1694-1768) did in his book, On the Intention of Jesus and his Disciples, published posthumously for fear of it putting its author in danger. If Dr. O’Brien finds Paine’s theological ideas offensive. I dread to think what he would make of those of Reimarus. 

Christian leaders have always feared criticism, and like the mullahs of present-day Islam, have systematically sought to suppress it. There is an echo of this in Dr. O’Brien’s observation that while Paine was “entitled…to have his own views” he had no right “to foist” them on the public in case he was thought by those who followed him as being “a potential expert” in theology. In fact Paine was a highly competent lay theologian being far better informed than most of his critics, while those on par with him such as Priestley and Watson, are noteworthy for accepting much of what he wrote, though often with obvious reluctance. Thus Priestley concedes Paine’s argument on revelation, but sought to reduce its significance by claiming, “we do not say that revelation made immediately to Moses, or to Christ, is strictly speaking, to us (Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever. Part 3, Containing An Answer to Mr. Paine’s Age of Reason. Philadelphia, T. Dodson, 1795. p.27). In addition, he also, like Paine, refers to prophets as poets (p.77). . 

When Christianity was imposed upon the Roman Empire its bishops sought to eliminate all works critical of their cult, its beliefs, practices and claims, thus in 326 CE they had the emperor Constantine promulgate an imperial edict ordering all books written by “heretics” (eg. those by Christian holding minority opinions) be hunted down and destroyed. In 333 CE this was extended to encompass all pagan works critical of Christianity, these were “to be consigned to the fire”. The dominant European Christian sect, Roman Catholicism pursued any potential challenger of its ideas. We see this in a book by a learned judge, Nicholas Remy (1530-1612). In it he writes of himself and his fellow judges sentencing very young children to be “stripped and beaten with rods around the place where their parents were being burned alive” because they were tainted with their parents heresies. He writes at length of one Lawrence of Ars-sur-Moselle who had participated in a coven at which he had turned the spit on which meat had been roasted. The learned judges (Remy was Attorney-General of Lorraine) debated his crime at great length, and while some wanted to send the prisoner to be burned alive at the stake, humanity prevailed and it was decided to sentence him to perpetual imprisonment in a convent run by the Minims, who, Remy explains, were “exceedingly strict” and who practised “extraordinary self abnegation” and cultivated “a spirit of humblest penitence” (Demonolatry. Edited by M. Summers. John Rodker, 1930. pp.95-98). This fate must have been a long drawn out hell on earth for the victim, who, before I forget it, was only six years old. In a period of ten years Remy sent 900 men, women and children to be burned alive as witches, naming 128 in his book, which was first published in 1595 and frequently reprinted and used by other inquisitors and judges as an authoritative source. To avoid appearing to be biased by singling out Roman Catholicism, I cite an example of Protestant brutality, that involving Thomas Aikenhead. This 18 year old youth was hanged in Edinburgh in 1697 for the heinous crime of maintaining that Ezra not Moses was the author of the first five books of the bible, holding that Jesus was not god, rejecting the trinity and being a deist. All these ideas can be found in The Age of Reason, and the successors of the Edinburgh clerics would have gladly hanged Paine, while Remy would have delighted in burning him for he considered unbelief to be equal, if not worse, than witchcraft, but bemoaned the difficulty of discovering such people as they kept their opinions to themselves (p.vi). 

One important fact has to be grasped, one which Dr.O’Brien pointedly ignores, namely that Paine’s criticism of Christianity was as much political as it was theological, as the historian, E.J. Hobsbawm so succinctly put it, throughout pages of The Age of Reason: 

“there glows the exaltation of the discovery of how easy (his emphasis) it is, once you have decided to see clearly, to discover that what the priests say about the bible, or the rich, about society, is wrong” (Labouring Men, Studies in the History of Labour. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1968. p.4). 

Nowhere in his book does Paine deny the historicity of Jesus, Mary or Joseph, although he would have been familiar with the mythicist thesis of his colleagues Volney and Dupuis, but he rightly questioned the validity of some of the claims made about them. He does not, as Dr. O’Brien claims, hold that gospels were “all written in or about the same time by individuals who had lived with Jesus….”, but says we do not know who wrote them. As to when they first appeared, Paine writes of this being “a matter of uncertainty”. Perhaps Dr. O’Brien should have read The Age of Reason with less indignation and more care, for had he done so he would have discovered exactly what Paine thought of Jesus. He would have encountered his emphasis on Jesus’s Jewishness, and his argument that it was others who put a veneer of supernaturalism on him. Jesus, Paine maintains, was a man not a god and had no intention of starting a new religion. Here, too, it is worth noting that in Judaism, as the distinguished Jewish scholar, Hyam Maccoby has pointed out, for anyone “to claim to be the Messiah was simply to claim the throne of Israel”, an office carrying “no connotation of deity or divinity”. Nor was it blasphemous to make such a claim, as it was open to anyone to put himself forward as messiah (H. Maccoby. The Myth Maker, Paul and the Invention of Christianity. 1986. p.37). Paine appears to have been fully aware of this and so I would suggest that contrary to what Dr. O’Brien claims he possessed a very profound and deep understanding of Judaism, which is why he saw Jesus as a political agitator who wanted to free his fellow citizens from foreign domination. He makes this point vividly in the quotation from The Age of Reason which I reproduce below and with which I conclude: 

“The accusation which those priests brought against him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which the Jews were then subject and tributary; and it is not improbable that the Roman might have some secret apprehensions of the effects of his doctrine, as well as the Jewish priests; neither was it improbable that Jesus Christ had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage of the Romans. Between the two. however, this virtuous reformer and revolutionist lost his life” (my emphasis – RWM). (P.S. Foner, The Life and Major Writings of Thomas Paine. 1974. p.469. All other quotes from Paine come from the same work)

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