Henry Rowley: "His 'Age of Reason' was written as much in defense of God as in opposition to the church. He could not believe that God was guilty of the cruelties and crimes which the writers of the Bible attributed to him."
"The 'Age of Reason' was the protest of a highly moral man against the doings of a deeply immoral God."
Lucy N. Colman: "Thomas Paine's God was justice."
Bishop Watson: "There is a philosophical sublimity in some of your ideas when speaking of the Creator of the universe."
The work of orthodox religious teachers, unwittingly to many, is confined chiefly to the propagation of fictions and the suppression of facts. The Christian who has been surprised to learn that Paine was not an Atheist, may be equally surprised to learn that his great compeers, Washington, Jefferson and Franklin, were not Christians, but like him, Deists.
Washington, who has been claimed by the Episcopal church, was like Paine a Deist: His wife was a communicant of this church. During his eight years incumbency of the Presidency, and during the Revolution, and at other times when Mrs. Washington was with him in Philadelphia, he attended, but not regularly, the Episcopal churches of which Bishop White, father of the Episcopal church of America, and the Rev. Dr. Abercrombie were rectors. When Bishop White was asked if Washington had ever communed he replied: "Truth requires me to say that Gen. Washington never received the communion in the churches of which I am the parochial minister"—Memoir of Bishop White, pp. 196, 197. The Western Christian Advocate accepts this testimony as conclusive. It says: "Bishop White seems to have had more intimate relations with Washington than any clergyman of his time. His testimony outweighs any amount of influential argumentation on the question."
Dr. Abercrombie says: "On sacramental Sundays, Gen. Washington, immediately after the desk and pulpit services went out with the greater part of the congregation—always leaving Mrs. Washington with the other communicants."—Sprague's Annals of the American Pulpit, vol. v., p. 394.
Fearing the effect of Washington's example Dr. Abercrombie administered a mild reproof. Washington, he says, "never afterwards came on the morning of sacramental Sunday."—Ibid.
Regarding Washington's conduct in Virginia, the Rev. Beverly Tucker, D.D., of the Episcopal church, says: "The General was accustomed on Communion Sundays to leave the church with her [Nellie Custis, his step-granddaughter], sending back the carriage for Mrs. Washington."
The Rev. William Jackson, who was at a later, period, rector of this church, conducted an exhaustive search to discover if possible some evidence of Washington once having communed. His search was futile. He says: "I find no one who ever communed with him."