"Paine wrote the 'Age of Reason' in Paris some years after Franklin was dead.... The letter called the letter of Franklin to Paine bears no address or date or signature. It may not have been written by Franklin to anybody. The evangelists who cite this letter intend to convey the impression that the 'Tiger' means unbelief. The indication is that the writer had in his mind the beast of fanaticism and detraction. That tiger was let loose by the 'Age of Reason' against its author, and the animal and its whelps are still with us."—George E. Macdonald.
Another Franklin myth is that concerning Franklin's motion for prayers in the Convention that framed our Constitution. The Convention, it is claimed, had labored for weeks without accomplishing anything when, at Franklin's suggestion, its sessions were opened with prayer, after which its work was speedily performed. While Franklin's proposal was not inconsistent with his Deistic belief it was not adopted. There was not a prayer offered from the opening to the close of the Convention. Franklin himself says: "The Convention, except three or four persons, thought prayers unnecessary."
Washington, Jefferson, Franklin and Paine were four of the greatest and noblest of men. All held substantially the same religious opinions. All were Deists. All rejected Christianity. Yet Washington, Jefferson and Franklin are held in grateful remembrance, while Paine has been reviled as no other man has been reviled. How do we account for this? Paine's mere rejection of Christianity does not account for it.
The "Age of Reason" was suppressed by the government in England. In America it could not be suppressed by law. The only way the clergy could suppress it here was to resort to slander, to cover its author's name with obloquy and make him appear so vile that no respectable bookseller would dare to sell it and no respectable reader dare to read it.
"In England it was easy for Paine's chief antagonist, the bishop of Llandaff [Watson] to rebuke Paine's strong language, when his lordship could sit serenely in the House of Peers with knowledge that his opponent was answered with handcuffs for every Englishman who sold his book. But in America slander had to take the place of handcuffs."—Dr. Conway.
Henry A. Beers: "His book was denounced from a hundred pulpits and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight of 'the young,' whose religious beliefs it might undermine."
James B. Elliott, of Philadelphia, says he well remembers the "time when it was impossible to obtain the 'Age of Reason' except under cover of the greatest secrecy and when he who was known to have read it was shunned as a dangerous person."
Hugh O. Pentecost: "Paine's offense was not that he was an Infidel, but that he made his meaning so clear that the common people could become Infidels, too."
"It is true that Paine was Republican and Deist, an enemy of kings and churches. But many men of great and undimmed honor held the same principles: Washington, Jefferson and Franklin and others of the 'Fathers' were Deists, and in England that creed was even fashionable in certain aristocratic quarters. Paine's real sin was not that he preached Deism in the land of Bolingbroke, Hume and Gibbon,... but that he succeeded for the first time in inoculating the people with his heresies."—The Nation, London.
"Mimnermus," an English writer, says: "There were critics of the Bible, it is true, before Paine's day, but they were mainly scholars whose works were not easily understood by ordinary folk. Paine himself, a man of genius, had sprung from the people, and he spoke their tongue and made their thoughts articulate."