Dr. Francis does not appear to have known Paine personally, but had seen him. Palmer's chief friends in New York were, he says, John Fellows; Rose, an unfortunate lawyer; Taylor, a philanthropist; and Charles Christian. Of Rev. John Foster, another rationalist lecturer, Dr. Francis says he had a noble presence and great eloquence. Foster's exordium was an invocation to the goddess of Liberty. He and Palmer called each other Brother. No doubt Paine completed the Triad.
Col. John Fellows, always the devoted friend of Paine, was an auctioneer, but in later life was a constable in the city courts. He has left three volumes which show considerable literary ability, and industrious research; but these were unfortunately bestowed on such extinct subjects as Freemasonry, the secret of Junius, and controversies concerning General Putnam. It is much to be regretted that Colonel Fellows should not have left a volume concerning Paine, with whom he was in especial intimacy, during his last years.
Other friends of Paine were Thomas Addis Emmet, Walter Morton, a lawyer, and Judge Hertell, a man of wealth, and a distinguished member of the State Assembly. Fulton also was much in New York, and often called on Paine. Paine was induced to board at the house of William Carver (36 Cedar Street), which proved a grievous mistake. Carver had introduced himself to Paine, saying that he remembered him when he was an exciseman at Lewes, England, he (Carver) being a young farrier there. He made loud professions of deism, and of devotion to Paine. The farrier of Lewes had become a veterinary practitioner and shopkeeper in New York. Paine supposed that he would be cared for in the house of this active rationalist, but the man and his family were illiterate and vulgar. His sojourn at Carver's probably shortened Paine's life. Carver, to anticipate the narrative a little, turned out to be a bad-hearted man and a traitor.
Paine had accumulated a mass of fragmentary writings on religious subjects, and had begun publishing them in a journal started in 1804 by Elihu Palmer,—The Prospect; or View of the Moral World. This succeeded the paper called The Temple of Reason. One of Paine's objects was to help the new journal, which attracted a good deal of attention. His first communication (February 18, 1804), was on a sermon by Robert Hall, on "Modern Infidelity," sent him by a gentleman in New York. The following are some of its trenchant paragraphs:
"Is it a fact that Jesus Christ died for the sins of the world, and how is it proved? If a God he could not die, and as a man he could not redeem: how then is this redemption proved to be fact? It is said that Adam eat of the forbidden fruit, commonly called an apple, and thereby subjected himself and all his posterity forever to eternal damnation. This is worse than visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations. But how was the death of Jesus Christ to affect or alter the case? Did God thirst for blood? If so, would it not have been better to have crucified Adam upon the forbidden tree, and made a new man?"
"Why do not the Christians, to be consistent, make Saints of Judas and Pontius Pilate, for they were the persons who accomplished the act of salvation. The merit of a sacrifice, if there can be any merit in it, was never in the thing sacrificed, but in the persons offering up the sacrifice—and therefore Judas and Pilate ought to stand first in the calendar of Saints."
Other contributions to the Prospect were: "Of the word Religion"; "Cain and Abel"; "The Tower of Babel"; "Of the religion of Deism compared with the Christian Religion"; "Of the Sabbath Day in Connecticut"; "Of the Old and New Testaments"; "Hints towards forming a Society for inquiring into the truth or falsehood of ancient history, so far as history is connected with systems of religion ancient and modern"; "To the members of the Society styling itself the Missionary Society"; "On Deism, and the writings of Thomas Paine"; "Of the Books of the New Testament" There were several communications without any heading. Passages and sentences from these little essays have long been a familiar currency among freethinkers.
"We admire the wisdom of the ancients, yet they had no bibles, nor books, called revelation. They cultivated the reason that God gave them, studied him in his works, and rose to eminence."
"The Cain and Abel of Genesis appear to be no other than the ancient Egyptian story of Typhon and Osiris, the darkness and the light, which answered very well as allegory without being believed as fact."
"Those who most believe the Bible are those who know least about it."