I will now give the language of Mr. Paine on religion, infidelity, atheism, fanaticism, and morality, and then subscribe the language of Junius.
In his discourse to the Theophilanthropists of Paris, Mr. Paine says: "Religion has two principal enemies—fanaticism and infidelity, or that which is called atheism. The first requires to be combatted by reason or morality, the other by natural philosophy." In opposing atheism he makes intelligent force the God of the universe. This is his language: "God is the power, or first cause, nature is the law, and matter is the subject acted upon." That is, there is a duality in the universe—force and matter; and the action of force on matter produces the laws of nature, or, every phenomenon is produced by the motion of matter. He founds his argument against atheism on the motion of matter, and elaborates it in his clear and forcible style, and then says: "Where will infidelity—where will atheism find cause for this astonishing velocity of motion, never ceasing, never varying, and which is the preservation of the earth in its orbit? It is not by reasoning from an acorn to an oak, or from any change in the state of matter on the surface of the earth, that this can be accounted for. Its cause is not to be found in matter, nor in any thing we call nature. The atheist who affects to reason, and the fanatic who rejects reason, plunge themselves alike into inextricable difficulties. The one perverts the sublime and enlightening study of natural philosophy into a deformity of absurdities by not reasoning to the end, the other loses himself in the obscurity of metaphysical theories, and dishonors the Creator by treating the study of his works with contempt. The one is a half-rational of whom there is some hope, the other is a visionary to whom we must be charitable."
I wish the reader to compare with the last sentence above the following extracts from Junius, to be found in Letters 44 and 35: "The opinions of these men are too absurd to be easily renounced. Liberal minds are open to conviction, liberal doctrines are capable of improvement. There are proselytes from atheism, but none from superstition." "When once a man is determined to believe, the very absurdity of the doctrine confirms him in his faith."
But Junius, like Paine, was a religious man. In Letter 56, he says: "I know such a man; my lord, I know you both, and, with the blessing of God (for I, too, am religious), the people of England shall know you as well as I do."
As Mr. Paine has been misunderstood by the religious world, and as so much has been said against his religion that a prejudice deep and bitter now rests on the world against him, I will give a couple of extracts from his Rights of Man on this point. I confess that my own prejudices were so great against him (and I thought myself quite liberal), that they would not suffer me to read his works till quite recently. Such is the tyranny of religious instruction. The first extract is from the first part. In a note, he says: "There is a single idea, which, if it strikes rightly upon the mind, either in a legal or a religious sense, will prevent any man, or any body of men, or any government, from going wrong on the subject of religion; which is, that before any human institutions of government were known in the world, there existed, if I may so express it, a compact between God and man from the beginning of time; and that, as the relation and condition which man in his individual person stands in toward his Maker can not be changed by any human laws or human authority, that religious devotion, which is a part of this compact, can not so much as be made a subject of human laws; and that all laws must conform themselves to the prior-existing compact, and not assume to make the compact conform to the laws, which, besides being human, are subsequent thereto. The first act of man, when he looked around and saw himself a creature which he did not make, and a world furnished for his reception, must have been devotion; and devotion must ever continue sacred to every individual man, as it appears right to him, and governments do mischief by interfering."
The next extract is from part second, near its close, and I would call the attention of the reader to the beauty of the allegory:
"But as religion is very improperly made a political machine, and the reality of it is thereby destroyed, I will conclude this work with stating in what light religion appears to me.
"If we suppose a large family of children on any particular day, or particular occasion, made it a custom to present to their parents some token of their affection and gratitude, each of them would make a different offering, and most probably in a different manner. Some would pay their congratulations in themes of verse and prose, others by some little devices, as their genius dictated or according to what they thought would please; and, perhaps, the least of all, not able to do any of those things, would ramble into the garden or the field and gather what it thought the prettiest flower it could find, though perhaps it might be but a simple weed. The parents would be more gratified by such a variety than if the whole of them had acted on a concerted plan, and each had made exactly the same offering. This would have the cold appearance of contrivance, or the harsh one of control. But of all unwelcome things nothing would more afflict the parent than to know that the whole of them had afterwards gotten together by the ears, boys and girls, fighting, and reviling, and abusing each other about which was the best or the worst present.