The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume II Part 14

So between the deists and the Christians there was, as Leslie Stephen says, a "comfortable compromise, which held together till Wesley from one side, and Thomas Paine from another, forced more serious thoughts on the age."*

* "History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century."

While "The Age of Reason" is thus, in one aspect, the product of its time, the renewal of an old siege--begun far back indeed as Celsus,--its intellectual originality is none the less remarkable. Paine is more complete master of the comparative method than Tindal in his "Christianity as old as the Creation." In his studies of "Christian Mythology" (his phrase), one is surprised by antic.i.p.ations of Baur and Strauss. These are all the more striking by reason of his homely ill.u.s.trations. Thus, in discussing the liabilities of ancient ma.n.u.scripts to manipulation, he mentions in his second Part that in the first, printed less than two years before, there was already a sentence he never wrote; and contrasts this with the book of nature wherein no blade of gra.s.s can be imitated or altered.* He distinguishes the historical Jesus from the mythical Christ with nicety, though none had previously done this. He is more discriminating than the early deists in his explanations of the scriptural marvels which he discredits. There was not the invariable alternative of imposture with which the orthodoxy of his time had been accustomed to deal. He does indeed suspect Moses with his rod of conjuring, and thinks no better of those who pretended knowledge of future events; but the incredible narratives are traditions, fables, and occasionally "downright lies."

* The sentence imported into Paine's Part First is: "The book of Luke was carried by one voice only." I find the words added as a footnote in the Philadelphia edition, 1794, p. 33. While Paine in Paris was utilizing the ascent of the footnote to his text, Dr. Priestley in Pennsylvania was using it to show Paine's untrustworthiness. ("Letters to a Philosophical Unbeliever," p. 73.) But it would appear, though neither discovered it, that Paine's critic was the real offender. In quoting the page, before answering it, Priestley incorporated in the text the footnote of an American editor. Priestley could not of course imagine such editorial folly, but all the same the reader may here see the myth-insect already building the Paine Mythology.

"It is not difficult to discover the progress by which even simple supposition, with the aid of credulity, will in time grow into a lie, and at last be told as a fact; and wherever we can find a charitable reason for a thing of this kind we ought not to indulge a severe one."

Paine's use of the word "lies" in this connection is an archaism.

Carlyle told me that his father always spoke of such tales as "The Arabian Nights" as "downright lies"; by which he no doubt meant fables without any indication of being such, and without any moral. Elsewhere Paine uses "lie" as synonymous with "fabulous"; when he means by the word what it would now imply, "wilful" is prefixed. In the Gospels he finds "inventions" of Christian Mythologists--tales founded on vague rumors, relics of primitive works of imagination mistaken for history,--fathered upon disciples who did not write them.

His treatment of the narrative of Christ's resurrection may be selected as an example of his method. He rejects Paul's testimony, and his five hundred witnesses to Christ's reappearance, because the evidence did not convince Paul himself, until he was struck by lightning, or otherwise converted. He finds disagreements in the narratives of the gospels, concerning the resurrection, which, while proving there was no concerted imposture, show that the accounts were not written by witnesses of the events; for in this case they would agree more nearly. He finds in the narratives of Christ's reappearances,--"suddenly coming in and going out when doors are shut, vanis.h.i.+ng out of sight and appearing again,"--and the lack of details, as to his dress, etc., the familiar signs of a ghost-story, which is apt to be told in different ways. "Stories of this kind had been told of the a.s.sa.s.sination of Julius Caesar, not many years before, and they generally have their origin in violent deaths, or in the execution of innocent persons. In cases of this kind compa.s.sion lends its aid, and benevolently stretches the story. It goes on a little and a little further, till it becomes a most certain truth. Once start a ghost, and credulity fills up its life and a.s.signs the cause of its appearance." The moral and religious importance of the resurrection would thus be an afterthought. The secrecy and privacy of the alleged appearances of Christ after death are, he remarks, repugnant to the supposed end of convincing the world.*

* In 1778 Lessing set forth his "New Hypothesis of the Evangelists," that they had independently built on a basis derived from some earlier Gospel of the Hebrews,--a theory now confirmed by the recovered fragments of that lost Memoir, collected by Dr. Nicholson of the Bodleian Library.

It is tolerably certain that Paine was unacquainted with Lessing's work, when he became convinced, by variations in the accounts of the resurrection, that some earlier narrative "became afterwards the foundation of the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,"--these being, traditionally eye-witnesses.

Paine admits the power of the deity to make a revelation. He therefore deals with each of the more notable miracles on its own evidence, adhering to his plan of bringing the Bible to judge the Bible. Such an investigation, written with lucid style and quaint ill.u.s.tration, without one timid or uncandid sentence, coming from a man whose services and sacrifices for humanity were great, could not have failed to give the "Age of Reason" long life, even had these been its only qualities. Four years before the book appeared, Burke said in Parliament: "Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and the whole race who call themselves freethinkers?" Paine was, in one sense, of this intellectual pedigree; and had his book been only a digest and expansion of previous negative criticisms, and a more thorough restatement of theism, these could have given it but a somewhat longer life; the "Age of Reason" must have swelled Burke's list of forgotten freethinking books. But there was an immortal soul in Paine's book. It is to the consideration of this its unique life, which has defied the darts of criticism for a century, and survived its own faults and limitations, that we now turn.

II. Paine's book is the uprising of the human heart against the Religion of Inhumanity.

This a.s.sertion may be met with a chorus of denials that there was, or is, in Christendom any Religion of Inhumanity. And, if Thomas Paine is enjoying the existence for which he hoped, no heavenly anthem would be such music in his ears as a chorus of stormiest denials from earth reporting that the Religion of Inhumanity is so extinct as to be incredible. Nevertheless, the Religion of Inhumanity did exist, and it defended against Paine a G.o.d of battles, of pomp, of wrath; an instigator of race hatreds and exterminations; an establisher of slavery; a commander of ma.s.sacres in punishment of theological beliefs; a sender of lying spirits to deceive men, and of destroying angels to afflict them with plagues; a creator of millions of human beings under a certainty of their eternal torture by devils and fires of his own creation. This apotheosis of Inhumanity is here called a religion, because it managed to survive from the ages of savagery by violence of superst.i.tion, to gain a throne in the Bible by killing off all who did not accept its authority to the letter, and because it was represented by actual inhumanities. The great obstruction of Science and Civilization was that the Bible was quoted in sanction of war, crusades against alien religions, murders for witchcraft, divine right of despots, degradation of reason, exaltation of credulity, punishment of opinion and unbiblical discovery, contempt of human virtues and human nature, and costly ceremonies before an invisible majesty, which, exacted from the means of the people, were virtually the offering of human sacrifices.

There had been murmurs against this consecrated Inhumanity through the ages, dissentients here and there; but the Revolution began with Paine.

Nor was this accidental. He was just the one man in the world who had undergone the training necessary for this particular work.

The higher clergy, occupied with the old textual controversy, proudly instructing Paine in Hebrew or Greek idioms, little realized their ignorance in the matter now at issue. Their ignorance had been too carefully educated to even imagine the University in which words are things, and things the word, and the many graduations pa.s.sed between Thetford Quaker meeting and the French Convention. What to scholastics, for whom humanities meant ancient cla.s.sics, were the murders and ma.s.sacres of primitive tribes, declared to be the word and work of G.o.d?

Words, mere words. They never saw these things. But Paine had seen that war-G.o.d at his work. In childhood he had seen the hosts of the Defender of the Faith as, dripping with the blood of Culloden and Inverness, they marched through Thetford; in manhood he had seen the desolations wrought "by the grace of" that deity to the royal invader of America; he had seen the ma.s.sacres ascribed to Jahve repeated in France, while Robespierre and Couthon were establis.h.i.+ng wors.h.i.+p of an infra-human deity. By sorrow, poverty, wrong, through long years, amid revolutions and death-agonies, the stay-maker's needle had been forged into a pen of lightning. No Oxonian conductor could avert that stroke, which was not at mere irrationalities, but at a huge idol wors.h.i.+pped with human sacrifices. The creation of the heart of Paine, historically traceable, is so wonderful, its outcome seems so supernatural, that in earlier ages he might have been invested with fable, like some Avatar. Of some such man, no doubt, the Hindu poets dreamed in their picture of young Arguna (in the _Bhagavatgita_). The warrior, borne to the battlefield in his chariot, finds arrayed against him his kinsmen, friends, preceptors.

He bids his charioteer pause; he cannot fight those he loves. His charioteer turns: 't is the radiant face of divine Chrishna, his Saviour! Even He has led him to this grievous contention with kinsmen, and those to whose welfare he was devoted. Chrishna instructs his disciple that the war is an illusion; it is the conflict by which, from age to age, the divine life in the world is preserved. "This imperishable devotion I declared to the sun, the sun delivered it to Manu, Manu to Ikshaku; handed down from one to another it was studied by the royal sages. In the lapse of time that devotion was lost. It is even the same discipline which I this day communicate to thee, for thou art my servant and my friend. Both thou and I have pa.s.sed through many births. Mine are known to me; thou knowest not of thine. I am made evident by my own power: as often as there is a decline of virtue, and an insurrection of wrong and injustice in the world, I appear."

Paine could not indeed know his former births; and, indeed, each former self of his--Wycliffe, Fox, Roger Williams--was sectarianized beyond recognition. He could hardly see kinsmen in the Unitarians, who were especially eager to disown the heretic affiliated on them by opponents; nor in the Wesleyans, though in him was the blood of their apostle, who declared salvation a present life, free to all. In a profounder sense, Paine was George Fox. Here was George Fox disowned, freed from his accidents, naturalized in the earth and humanized in the world of men.

Paine is explicable only by the intensity of his Quakerism, consuming its own traditions as once the church's ceremonies and sacraments. On him, in Thetford meeting-house, rolled the burden of that Light that enlighteneth every man, effacing distinctions of rank, race, s.e.x, making all equal, clearing away privilege, whether of priest or mediator, subjecting all scriptures to its immediate illumination.

This faith was a fearful heritage to carry, even in childhood, away from the Quaker environment which, by mixture with modifying "survivals," in habit and doctrine, cooled the fiery gospel for the average tongue.

The intermarriage of Paine's father with a family in the English Church brought the precocious boy's Light into early conflict with his kindred, his little lamp being still fed in the meeting-house. A child brought up without respect for the conventional symbols of religion, or even with pious antipathy to them, is as if born with only one spiritual skin; he will bleed at a touch.

"I well remember, when about seven or eight years of age, hearing a sermon read by a relation of mine, who was a great devotee of the Church, upon the subject of what is called _redemption by the death of the Son of G.o.d_. After the sermon was ended I went into the garden, and as I was going down the garden steps, (for I perfectly remember the spot), I revolted at the recollection of what I had heard, and thought to myself that it was making G.o.d Almighty act like a pa.s.sionate man, that killed his son when he could not revenge himself in any other way; and, as I was sure a man would be hanged that did such a thing, I could not see for what purpose they preached such sermons. This was not one of that kind of thoughts that had anything in it of childish levity; it was to me a serious reflection, arising from the idea I had, that G.o.d was too good to do such an action, and also too almighty to be under any necessity of doing it. I believe in the same manner at this moment; and I moreover believe that any system of religion that has anything in it which shocks the mind of a child, cannot be a true system."

The child took his misgivings out into the garden; he would not by a denial shock his aunt c.o.c.ke's faith as his own had been shocked. For many years he remained silent in his inner garden, nor ever was drawn out of it until he found the abstract dogma of the death of G.o.d's Son an altar for sacrificing men, whom he reverenced as all G.o.d's sons. What he used to preach at Dover and Sandwich cannot now be known. His ignorance of Greek and Latin, the scholastic "humanities," had prevented his becoming a clergyman, and introduced him to humanities of another kind.

His mission was then among the poor and ignorant.*

* "Old John Berry, the late Col. Hay's servant, told me he knew Paine very well when he was at Dover--had heard him preach there--thought him a staymaker by trade."--W. Weedon, of Glynde, quoted in Notes and Queries (London), December 29, 1866.

Sixteen years later he is in Philadelphia, attending the English Church, in which he had been confirmed. There were many deists in that Church, whose laws then as now were sufficiently liberal to include them. In his "Common Sense" (published January 10, 1776) Paine used the reproof of Israel (I. Samuel) for desiring a King. John Adams, a Unitarian and monarchist, asked him if he really believed in the inspiration of the Old Testament. Paine said he did not, and intended at a later period to publish his opinions on the subject. There was nothing inconsistent in Paine's believing that a pa.s.sage confirmed by his own Light was a divine direction, though contained in a book whose alleged inspiration throughout he did not accept. Such was the Quaker principle. Before that, soon after his arrival in the country, when he found African Slavery supported by the Old Testament, Paine had repudiated the authority of that book; he declares it abolished by "Gospel light,"

which includes man-stealing among the greatest crimes. When, a year later, on the eve of the Revolution, he writes "Common Sense," he has another word to say about religion, and it is strictly what the human need of the hour demands. Whatever his disbeliefs, he could never sacrifice human welfare to them, any more than he would, suffer dogmas to sacrifice the same. It would have been a grievous sacrifice of the great cause of republican independence, consequently, of religious liberty, had he introduced a theological controversy at the moment when it was of vital importance that the sects should rise above their part.i.tion-walls and unite for a great common end. The Quakers, deistical as they were, preserved religiously the separatism once compulsory; and Paine proved himself the truest Friend among them when he was "moved"

by the Spirit of Humanity, for him at length the Holy Spirit, to utter (1776) his brave cheer for Catholicity.

"As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all governments to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the n.i.g.g.ards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions amongst us: it affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and, on this liberal principle, I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names."

There was no pedantry whatever about Paine, this obedient son of Humanity. He would defend Man against men, against sects and parties; he would never quarrel about the botanical label of a tree bearing such fruits as the Declaration of Independence. But no man better knew the power of words, and that a botanical error may sometimes result in destructive treatment of the tree. For this reason he censured the Quakers for opposing the Revolution on the ground that, in the words of their testimony (1776), "the setting up and putting down kings and governments is G.o.d's peculiar prerogative." Kings, he answers, are not removed by miracles, but by just such means as the Americans were using.

"Oliver Cromwell thanks you. Charles, then, died not by the hands of man; and should the present proud imitator of him come to the same untimely end, the writers and publishers of the Testimony are bound, by the doctrine it contains, to applaud the fact."

He was then a Christian. In his "Epistle to Quakers" he speaks of the dispersion of the Jews as "foretold by our Saviour." In his famous first _Crisis_ he exhorts the Americans not to throw "the burden of the day upon Providence, but 'show your faith by your works,' that G.o.d may bless you." For in those days there was visible to such eyes as his, as to anti-slavery eyes in our civil war,

"A fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel."

The Republic, not American but Human, became Paine's religion. "Divine Providence intends this country to be the asylum of persecuted virtue from every quarter of the globe." So he had written before the Declaration of Independence. In 1778 he finds that there still survives some obstructive superst.i.tion among English churchmen in America about the connection of Protestant Christianity with the King. In his seventh _Crisis_(November 21, 1778) he wrote sentences inspired by his new conception of religion.

"In a Christian and philosophical sense, mankind seem to have stood still at individual civilization, and to retain as nations all the original rudeness of nature.... As individuals we profess ourselves Christians, but as nations we are heathens, Romans, and what not. I remember the late Admiral Saunders declaring in the House of Commons, and that in the time of peace, 'That the city of Madrid laid in ashes was not a sufficient atonement for the Spaniards taking off the rudder of an English sloop of war.'... The arm of Britain has been spoken of as the arm of the Almighty, and she has lived of late as if she thought the whole world created for her diversion. Her politics, instead of civilizing, has tended to brutalize mankind, and under the vain unmeaning t.i.tle of 'Defender of the Faith,' she has made war like an Indian on the Religion of Humanity."'

Thus, forty years before Auguste Comte sat, a youth of twenty, at the feet of Saint Simon, learning the principles now known as "The Religion of Humanity,"* Thomas Paine had not only minted the name, but with it the idea of international civilization, in which nations are to treat each other as gentlemen in private life. National honor was, he said, confused with "bullying"; but "that which is the best character for an individual is the best character for a nation." The great and pregnant idea was, as in the previous instances, occasional. It was a sentence pa.s.sed upon the "Defender-of-the-Faith" superst.i.tion, which detached faith from humanity, and had pressed the Indian's tomahawk into the hands of Jesus.

* Mr. Thaddeus B. Wakeman, an eminent representative of the "Religion of Humanity," writes me that he has not found this phrase in any work earlier than Paine's _Crisis_, vii.

At the close of the American Revolution there appeared little need for a religious reformation. The people were happy, prosperous, and, there being no favoritism toward any sect under the new state const.i.tutions, but perfect equality and freedom, the Religion of Humanity meant sheathing of controversial swords also. It summoned every man to lend a hand in repairing the damages of war, and building the new nationality.

Paine therefore set about constructing his iron bridge of thirteen symbolic ribs, to overleap the ice-floods and quicksands of rivers. His a.s.sistant in this work, at Bordentown, New Jersey, John Hall, gives us in his journal, glimpses of the religious ignorance and fanaticism of that region. But Paine showed no aggressive spirit towards them. "My employer," writes Hall (1786), "has _Common Sense_ enough to disbelieve most of the common systematic theories of Divinity, but does not seem to establish any for himself." In all of his intercourse with Hall (a Unitarian just from England), and his neighbors, there is no trace of any disposition to deprive any one of a belief, or to excite any controversy. Humanity did not demand it, and by that direction he left the people to their weekly toils and Sunday sermons.

But when (1787) he was in England, Humanity gave another command. It was obeyed in the eloquent pages on religious liberty and equality in "The Rights of Man." Burke had alarmed the nation by pointing out that the Revolution in France had laid its hand on religion. The cry was raised that religion was in danger. Paine then uttered his impressive paradox:

"Toleration is not the opposite of intoleration, but the counterfeit of it. Both are despotisms. The one a.s.sumes the right of withholding liberty of conscience, and the other of granting it. The one is the pope armed with fire and f.a.ggot, the other is the pope selling or granting indulgences.... Toleration by the same a.s.sumed authority by which it tolerates a man to pay his wors.h.i.+p, presumptuously and blasphemously sets itself up to tolerate the Almighty to receive it.... Who then art thou, vain dust and ashes, by whatever name thou art called, whether a king, a bishop, a church or a state, a parliament or anything else, that obtrudest thine insignificance between the soul of man and his maker?

Mind thine own concerns. If he believes not as thou believest, it is a proof that thou believest not as he believeth, and there is no earthly power can determine between you.... Religion, without regard to names, as directing itself from the universal family of mankind to the divine object of all adoration, is man bringing to his maker the fruits of his heart; and though these fruits may differ like the fruits of the earth, the grateful tribute of every one is accepted."

This, which I condense with reluctance, was the affirmation which the Religion of Humanity needed in England. But when he came to sit in the French Convention a new burden rolled upon him. There was Marat with the Bible always before him, picking out texts that justified his murders; there were Robespierre and Couthon invoking the G.o.d of Nature to sanction just such ma.s.sacres as Marat found in his Bible; and there were crude "atheists" consecrating the ferocities of nature more dangerously than if they had named them Siva, Typhon, or Satan. Paine had published the rights of man for men; but here human hearts and minds had been buried under the superst.i.tions of ages. The great mischief had ensued, to use his own words, "by the possession of power before they understood principles: they earned liberty in words but not in fact" Exhumed suddenly, as if from some Nineveh, resuscitated into semi-conscious strength, they remembered only the methods of the allied inquisitors and tyrants they were overthrowing; they knew no justice but vengeance; and when on crumbled idols they raised forms called "Nature" and "Reason,"

old idols gained life in the new forms. These were the G.o.ds which had but too literally created, by the slow evolutionary force of human sacrifices, the new revolutionary priesthood. Their ma.s.sacres could not be questioned by those who acknowledged the divine hand in the slaughter of Canaanites.*

* On August 10, 1793, there was a sort of communion of the Convention around the statue of Nature, whose b.r.e.a.s.t.s were fountains of water. Herault de Sech.e.l.les, at that time president, addressed the statue: "Sovereign of the savage and of the enlightened nations, O Nature, this great people, gathered at the first beam of day before thee, is free! It is in thy bosom, it is in thy sacred sources, that it has recovered its rights, that it has regenerated itself after traversing so many ages of error and servitude: it must return to the simplicity of thy ways to rediscover liberty and equality. O Nature! receive the expression of the eternal attachment of the French people for thy laws; and may the teeming waters gus.h.i.+ng from thy b.r.e.a.s.t.s, may this pure beverage which refreshed the first human beings, consecrate in this Cup of Fraternity and Equality the vows that France makes thee this day,--the most beautiful that the sun has illumined since it was suspended in the immensity of s.p.a.ce." The cup pa.s.sed around from lip to lip, amid fervent e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.i.o.ns. Next year Nature's b.r.e.a.s.t.s issued Herault's blood.

The Religion of Humanity again issued its command to its minister. The "Age of Reason" was written, in its first form, and printed in French.

"Couthon," says Lanthenas, "to whom I sent it, seemed offended with me for having translated it"* Couthon raged against the priesthood, but could not tolerate a work which showed vengeance to be atheism, and compa.s.sion--not merely for men, but for animals--true wors.h.i.+p of G.o.d.

* The letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville, of which the original French is before me, is quoted in an article in Scribner, September, 1880, by Hon. E. B. Washbarne (former Minister to France); it is reprinted in Remsburg's compilation of testimonies: "Thomas Paine, the Apostle of Religions and Political Liberty" (1880). See also p. 135 of this volume.

On the other hand, Paine's opposition to atheism would appear to have brought him into danger from another quarter, in which religion could not be distinguished from priestcraft. In a letter to Samuel Adams Paine says that he endangered his life by opposing the king's execution, and "a second time by opposing atheism." Those who denounce the "Age of Reason" may thus learn that red-handed Couthon, who hewed men to pieces before his Lord, and those who acknowledged no Lord, agreed with them. Under these menaces the original work was as I have inferred, suppressed. But the demand of Humanity was peremptory, and Paine re-wrote it all, and more. When it appeared he was a prisoner; his life was in Couthon's hands. He had personally nothing to gain by its publication--neither wife, child, nor relative to reap benefit by its sale. It was published as purely for the good of mankind as any work ever written. Nothing could be more simply true than his declaration, near the close of life:

"As in my political works my motive and object have been to give man an elevated sense of his own character, and free him from the slavish and superst.i.tious absurdity of monarchy and hereditary government, so, in my publications on religious subjects, my endeavors have been directed to bring man to a right use of the reason that G.o.d has given him; to impress on him the great principles of divine morality, justice, and mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men, and to all creatures; and to inspire in him a spirit of trust, confidence and consolation, in his Creator, unshackled by the fables of books pretending to be the word of G.o.d."

It is misleading at the present day to speak of Paine as an opponent of Christianity. This would be true were Christianity judged by the authorized formulas of any church; but nothing now acknowledged as Christianity by enlightened Christians of any denomination was known to him. In our time, when the humanizing wave, pa.s.sing through all churches, drowns old controversies, floats the dogmas, till it seems ungenerous to quote creeds and confessions in the presence of our "orthodox" lovers of man--even "totally depraved" and divinely doomed man--the theological eighteenth century is inconceivable. Could one wander from any of our churches, unless of the Christian Pagans or remote villagers (_pagani_), into those of the last century, he would find himself moving in a wilderness of cinders, with only the plaintive song of John and Charles Wesley to break the solitude. If he would hear recognition of the human Jesus, on whose credit the crowned Christ is now maintained, he would be sharply told that it were a sin to "know Christ after the flesh," and must seek such recognition among those stoned as infidels. Three n.o.ble and pathetic tributes to the Man of Nazareth are audible from the last century--those of Rousseau, Voltaire, and Paine. From its theologians and its pulpits not one! Should the tribute of Paine be to-day submitted, without his name, to our most eminent divines, even to leading American and English Bishops, beside any theological estimate of Christ from the same century, the Jesus of Paine would be surely preferred.

Should our cultured Christian of to-day press beyond those sectarian, miserable controversies of the eighteenth century, known to him now as cold ashes, into the seventeenth century, he would find himself in a comparatively embowered land; that is, in England, and in a few oases in America--like that of Roger Williams in Rhode Island. In England he would find brain and heart still in harmony, as in Tillotson and South; still more in Bishop Jeremy Taylor, "Shakespeare of divines." He would hear this Jeremy reject the notions of original sin and transmitted guilt, maintain the "liberty of prophesying," and that none should suffer for conclusions concerning a book so difficult of interpretation as the Bible. In those unsophisticated years Jesus and the disciples and the Marys still wore about them the reality gained in miracle-plays.

What Paine need arise where poets wrote the creed, and men knew the Jesus of whom Thomas Dekker wrote:

"The best of men That e'er wore earth about him was a sufferer; A soft, meek, patient, humble, tranquil spirit, The first true gentleman that ever breathed."

Dean Swift, whose youth was nourished in that living age, pa.s.sed into the era of dismal disputes, where he found the churches "dormitories of the living as well as of the dead." Some ten years before Paine's birth the Dean wrote: "Since the union of Divinity and Humanity is the great Article of our Religion, 't is odd to see some clergymen, in their writings of Divinity, wholly devoid of Humanity." Men have, he said, enough religion to hate, but not to love. Had the Dean lived to the middle of the eighteenth century he might have discovered exceptions to this holy heartlessness, chiefly among those he had traditionally feared--the Socinians. These, like the Magdalene, were seeking the lost humanity of Jesus. He would have sympathized with Wesley, who escaped from "dormitories of the living" far enough to publish the Life of a Socinian (Firmin), with the brave apology, "I am sick of opinions, give me the life." But Socianism, in eagerness to disown its bolder children, presently lost the heart of Jesus, and when Paine was recovering it the best of them could not comprehend his separation of the man from the myth. So came on the desiccated Christianity of which Emerson said, even among the Unitarians of fifty years ago, "The prayers and even the dogmas of our church are like the zodiac of Denderah, wholly insulated from anything now extant in the life and business of the people."

Emerson may have been reading Paine's idea that Christ and the Twelve were mythically connected with Sun and Zodiac, this speculation being an indication of their distance from the Jesus he tenderly revered. If Paine rent the temple-veils of his time, and revealed the stony images behind them, albeit with rudeness, let it not be supposed that those forms were akin to the Jesus and the Marys whom skeptical criticism is re-incarnating, so that they dwell with us. Outside Paine's heart the Christ of his time was not more like the Jesus of our time than Jupiter was like the Prometheus he bound on a rock. The English Christ was not the Son of Man, but a Prince of Dogma, bearing handcuffs for all who reasoned about him; a potent phantasm that tore honest thinkers from their families and cast them into outer darkness, because they circulated the works of Paine, which reminded the clergy that the Jesus even of their own Bible sentenced those only who ministered not to the hungry and naked, the sick and in prison. Paine's religious culture was English. There the brain had retreated to deistic caves, the heart had gone off to "Salvationism" of the time; the churches were given over to the formalist and the politician, who carried divine sanction to the repet.i.tion of biblical oppressions and ma.s.sacres by Burke and Pitt. And in all the world there had not been one to cry _Sursum Corda_ against the consecrated tyranny until that throb of Paine's heart which brought on it the vulture. But to-day, were we not swayed by names and prejudices, it would bring on that prophet of the divine humanity, even the Christian dove.

Soon after the appearance of Part First of the "Age of Reason" it was expurgated of its negative criticisms, probably by some English Unitarians, and published as a sermon, with text from Job xi., 7: "Canst thou by searching find out G.o.d? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?" It was printed anonymously; and were its sixteen pages read in any orthodox church to-day it would be regarded as admirable.

It might be criticised by left wings as somewhat old-fas.h.i.+oned in the warmth of its theism. It is fortunate that Paine's name was not appended to this doubtful use of his work, for it would have been a serious misrepresentation.*

* "A Lecture on the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, as Deduced from a Contemplation of His Works. M,DCC,XCV."