The imprisonment of Williams was the beginning of a thirty years' war for religious liberty in England, in the course of which occurred many notable events, such as Eaton receiving homage in his pillory at Choring Cross, and the whole Carlile family imprisoned, -- its head imprisoned more than nine years for publishing the "Age of Reason." This last victory of persecution was suicidal.Gentlemen of wealth, not adherents of Paine, helped in setting Carlile up in business in Fleet Street, where free-thinking publications have since been sold without interruption.But though Liberty triumphed in one sense, the "Age of Reason." remained to some extent suppressed among those whose attention it especially merited.Its original prosecution by a Society for the Suppression of Vice (a device to, relieve the Crown)amounted to a libel upon a morally clean book, restricting its perusal in families; and the fact that the shilling book sold by and among humble people was alone prosecuted, diffused among the educated an equally false notion that the "Age of Reason" was vulgar and illiterate.The theologians, as we have seen, estimated more justly the ability of their antagonist, the collaborator of Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the University of Pennsylvania had conferred the degree of Master of Arts, -- but the gentry confused Paine with the class described by Burke as "the swinish multitude." Skepticism, or its free utterance, was temporarily driven out of polite circles by its complication with the out-lawed vindicator of the "Rights of Man." But that long combat has now passed away.Time has reduced the "Age of Reason" from a flag of popular radicalism to a comparatively conservative treatise, so far as its negations are concerned.An old friend tells me that in his youth he heard a sermon in which the preacher declared that "Tom Paine was so wicked that he could not be buried; his bones were thrown into a box which was bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer;"and now Paine is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!" This variant of the Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as unconscious homage to the author whose metaphorical bones may be recognized in buttons now fashionable, and some even found useful in holding clerical vestments together.
But the careful reader will find in Paine's "Age of Reason" something beyond negations, and in conclusion I will especially call attention to the new departure in Theism indicated in a passage corresponding to a famous aphorism of Kant, indicated by a note in Part II.The discovery already mentioned, that Part I.was written at least fourteen years before Part II., led me to compare the two; and it is plain that while the earlier work is an amplification of Newtonian Deism, based on the phenomena of planetary motion, the work of 1795 bases belief in God on "the universal display of himself in the works of the creation and by that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition to do good ones."This exaltation of the moral nature of man to be the foundation of theistic religion, though now familiar, was a hundred years ago a new affirmation;it has led on a conception of deity subversive of last-century deism, it has steadily humanized religion, and its ultimate philosophical and ethical results have not yet been reached.
The Age Of Reason - Part IIAge of ReasonPart II Preface Chapter I - The Old Testament Chapter II - The New Testament Chapter III - ConclusionPREFACE 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 I should undertake.The circumstances, however, which existed in France in the latter end of the year 1793, determined me to delay it no longer.The just and humane principles of the Revolution which Philosophy had first diffused, had been departed from.The Idea, always dangerous to Society as it is derogatory to the Almighty, -- that priests could forgive sins, -- though it seemed to exist no longer, had blunted the feelings of humanity, and callously prepared men for the commission of all crimes.
The intolerant spirit of church persecution had transferred itself into politics; the tribunals, stiled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an Inquisition; and the Guillotine of the Stake.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 me, that the same danger was approaching myself.
Under these disadvantages, I began the former part of the Age of Reason;I had, besides, neither Bible nor Testament [It must be borne in mind that throughout this work Paine generaly means by "Bible" only the Old Testamut, and speaks of the Now as the "Testament." -- Editor.] to refer to, though I was writing against both; nor could I procure any; notwithstanding which I have produced a work that no Bible Believer, though writing at his ease and with a Library of Church Books about him, can refute.Towards the latter end of December of that year, a motion was made and carried, to exclude foreigners from the Convention.There were but two, Anacharsis Cloots and myself; and I saw I was particularly pointed at by Bourdon de l'Oise, in his speech on that motion.
