Our collection of articles, records and reviews about Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason.
There can be no doubt that Paine’s ideas in the 1790’s had profound effects upon political thinking among Irish radicals, just as they did among the revolutionaries of France, the United States, and Britain. Both he and Wolfe Tone met in Paris in 1797 and during the “dragooning” of Ulster.
No one illustrates a form of committing political suicide better than Thomas Paine. He did not hesitate a moment to rush in to promote every good cause and to expose every injustice, and he ended up being generally despised, with virtually everyone his enemy for one reason or another.
![“Reason against unreason” a 1882 illustration by Joseph Keppler and Adolph Schwarzmann shows the “Light of Reason”, containing bust portraits of “Johannes Kepler, I. Kant, Thomas Paine, Jefferson, B. de Spinoza, Franklin, Voltaire, E.H. Haeckel, Tyndall, Huxley, [and] Darwin”, beaming against a large umbrella labeled “Bigotry, Supernaturalism, [and] Fanaticism” – Library of Congress](https://thomaspaine.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/Reason-against-unreason.jpg)
Paine appealed to reason, his ultimate cause was a democratic system of society. His spirit stands in glaring contrast to that of the politico-religious dictators who lorded it over most nations when he wrote, and who have their counterparts today in dictators.
Stories of Paine’s recantation or conversion were once the stock in trade of any self-respecting evangelical preacher or writer. In our more sophisticated age with its closer attention to detail, claims of such a specific nature have given way to those of a more general character.
The Age of Reason exerted an anti-religious influence on the reader at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Merciless criticism of the Bible, revelations of the hypocrisy of tho clergy, a passionate call to readers to rely on the facts of Nature and human reason.
We hear so often of intellectual tom-tits, who must needs take a fall out of Thomas Paine, that I feel a few words on the subject of the twittering tom-tits will not come amiss.
These persons being strongly attached to the Hindoo religion, and opposed to the propagation of Christianity, translated some parts of the “Age of Reason” into the native language.
Philip Foner’s introduction: The letter which follows the introduction was addressed to Thomas Erskine who had defended Paine in the government suit conducted in 1792 to suppress Rights of Man, but in 1797 conducted the prosecution of Thomas Williams, a London publisher and bookseller, accused by the Society for the Suppression of Vice and Immorality
I. AN ANSWER TO A FRIEND PARIS, May 12, 1797 IN your letter of the 20th of March, you give me several quotations from the Bible, which you call the ‘word of God,’ to shew me that my opinions on religion are wrong, and I could give you as many, from the same book to
See The Age of Reason — Part I here. PREFACE I HAVE mentioned in the former part of The Age of Reason that it had long been my intention to publish my thoughts upon Religion; but that I had originally reserved it to a later period in life, intending it to be the last work
See The Age of Reason — Part II here. CHAPTER I – THE AUTHOR’S PROFESSION OF FAITH. IT has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period
