[15] A letter of Franklin to someone who had shown him a freethinking manuscript, advising against its publication (Bettany’s ed. p. 620), has been conjecturally connected with Paine, but was clearly not addressed to him. Franklin died in 1790, and Paine was out of America from 1787 onwards. But the letter is in every way inapplicable to the Age of Reason. The remark: “If men are so wicked with religion, what would they be without it?” could not be made to a devout deist like Paine. [↑]
[16] Conway, Life of Paine, ii, 254–55. [↑]
[17] See Dr. Conway’s chapter, “The American Inquisition,” vol. ii, ch. xvi; also pp. 361–62, 374, 379. The falsity of the ordinary charges against Paine’s character is finally made clear by Dr. Conway, ch. xix, and pp. 371, 383, 419, 423. Cp. the author’s pamphlet, Thomas Paine: An Investigation (Bonner). The chronically revived story of his death-bed remorse for his writings—long ago exposed (Conway, ii, 420)—is definitively discredited in the latest reiteration. That occurs in the Life and Letters of Dr. R. H. Thomas (1905), the mother of whose stepmother was the Mrs. Mary Hinsdale, née Roscoe, on whose testimony the legend rests. Dr. Thomas, a Quaker of the highest character, accepted the story without question, but incidentally tells of the old lady (p. 13) that “her wandering fancies had all the charm of a present fairy-tale to us.” No further proof is needed, after the previous exposure, of the worthlessness of the testimony in question. [↑]
[19] See the details in Conway’s Life, ii, 280–81, and note. He had also a scheme for a gunpowder motor (id. and i, 240), and various other remarkable plans. [↑]
[21] Testimonies quoted by R. D. Owen, as cited, pp. 231–32. [↑]