Ideas travel lightly. Even a little two-masted schooner of eighty tons can carry enough new notions to upset an entire continent. The American colonists of the eighteenth century were obliged to do without sculpture and grand pianos, but they did not lack for books. The more intelligent among the people in the thirteen colonies began to understand that there was something astir in the big world, of which they had never heard anything in their Sunday sermons. The booksellers then became their prophets. And although they did not officially break away from the established church and changed little in their outer mode of life, they showed when the opportunity offered itself that they were faithful disciples of that old prince of Transylvania, who had refused to persecute his Unitarian subjects on the ground that the good Lord had expressly reserved for himself the right to three things: “To be able to create something out of nothing; to know the future; and to dominate man’s conscience.”
And when it became necessary to draw up a concrete political and social program for the future conduct of their country, these brave patriots incorporated their ideas into the documents in which they placed their ideals before the high court of public opinion.
It would undoubtedly have horrified the good citizens of Virginia had they known that some of the oratory to which they listened with such profound respect was directly inspired by their arch-enemies, the Libertines. But Thomas Jefferson, their most successful politician, was himself a man of exceedingly liberal views and when he remarked that religion could only be regulated by reason and conviction and not by force or violence; or again, that all men had an equal right to the free exercise of their religion according to the dictates of their conscience, he merely repeated what had been thought and written before by Voltaire and Bayle and Spinoza and Erasmus.
And later when the following heresies were heard: “that no declaration of faith should be required as a condition of obtaining any public office in the United States,” or “that Congress should make no law which referred to the establishment of religion or which prohibited the free exercise thereof,” the American rebels acquiesced and accepted.
In this way the United States came to be the first country where religion was definitely separated from politics; the first country where no candidate for office was forced to show his Sunday School certificate before he could accept the nomination; the first country in which people could, as far as the law was concerned, worship or fail to worship as they pleased.
But here as in Austria (or anywhere else for that matter) the average man lagged far behind his leaders and was unable to follow them as soon as they deviated the least little bit from the beaten track. Not only did many of the states continue to impose certain restrictions upon those of their subjects who did not belong to the dominant religion, but the citizens in their private capacity as New Yorkers or Bostonians or Philadelphians continued to be just as intolerant of those who did not share their own views as if they had never read a single line of their own Constitution. All of which was to show itself soon afterwards in the case of Thomas Paine.
Tom Paine rendered a very great service to the cause of the Americans.
He was the publicity man of the Revolution.
By birth he was an Englishman; by profession, a sailor; by instinct and training, a rebel. He was forty years old before he visited the colonies. While on a visit to London he had met Benjamin Franklin and had received the excellent advice “to go west.” In the year 1774, provided with letters of introduction from Benjamin himself, he had sailed for Philadelphia and had helped Richard Bache, the son-in-law of Franklin, to found a magazine, the “Pennsylvania Gazette.”
Being an inveterate amateur politician, Tom had soon found himself in the midst of those events that were trying men’s souls. And being possessed of a singularly well-ordered mind, he had taken hold of the ill-assorted collection of American grievances and had incorporated them into a pamphlet, short but sweet, which by a thorough application of “common sense” should convince the people that the American cause was a just cause and deserved the hearty coöperation of all loyal patriots.