* Dr. Francis' "Old New York," p. 139.
The second mouth of Cerberus was noisy throughout the land; revivalists were describing in New Jersey how some "infidel" had been struck blind in Virginia, and in Virginia how one was struck dumb in New Jersey. But here was the very head and front of what they called "infidelity," Thomas Paine, who ought to have gathered in his side a sheaf of thunderbolts, preserved by more marvellous "providences" than any sectarian saint. Out of one hundred and sixty carried to the guillotine from his prison, he alone was saved, by the accident of a chalk mark affixed to the wrong side of his cell door. On two ships he prepared to return to America, but was prevented; one sank at sea, the other was searched by the British for him particularly. And at the very moment when New Rochelle disciples were calling down fire on his head, Christopher Dederick tried vainly to answer the imprecation; within a few feet of Paine, his gun only shattered the window at which the author sat. "Providence must be as bad as Thomas Paine," wrote the old deist. This amounted to a sort of contest like that of old between the prophets of Baal and those of Jehovah. The deists were crying to their antagonists: "Perchance he sleepeth." It seemed a test case. If Paine was spared, what heretic need tremble? But he reached his threescore years and ten in comfort; and the placard of Satan flying off with him represented a last hope.
Skepticism and rationalism were not understood by pious people a hundred years ago. In some regions they are not understood yet. Renan thinks he will have his legend in France modelled after Judas. But no educated Christian conceives of a recantation or extraordinary death-bed for a Darwin, a Parker, an Emerson. The late Mr. Brad-laugh had some fear that he might be a posthumous victim of the "infidel's legend." In 1875, when he was ill in St Luke's Hospital, New York, he desired me to question the physicians and nurses, that I might, if necessary, testify to his fearlessness and fidelity to his views in the presence of death. But he has died without the "legend," whose decline dates from Paine's case; that was its crucial challenge.
The whole nation had recently been thrown into a wild excitement by the fall of Alexander Hamilton in a duel with Aaron Burr. Hamilton's world-liness had been notorious, but the clergymen (Bishop Moore and the Presbyterian John Mason) reported his dying words of unctuous piety and orthodoxy. In a public letter to the Rev. John Mason, Paine said:
"Between you and your rival in communion ceremonies, Dr. Moore of the Episcopal church, you have, in order to make yourselves appear of some importance, reduced General Hamilton's character to that of a feeble-minded man, who in going out of the world wanted a passport from a priest. Which of you was first applied to for this purpose is a matter of no consequence. The man, sir, who puts his trust and confidence in God, that leads a just and moral life, and endeavors to do good, does not trouble himself about priests when his hour of departure comes, nor permit priests to trouble themselves about him."
The words were widely commented on, and both sides looked forward, almost as if to a prize-fight, to the hour when the man who had unmade thrones, whether in earth or heaven, must face the King of Terrors. Since Michael and Satan had their legendary combat for the body of Moses, there was nothing like it. In view of the pious raids on Paine's death-bed, freethinkers have not been quite fair. To my own mind, some respect is due to those humble fanatics, who really believed that Paine was approaching eternal fires, and had a frantic desire to save him.*
* Nor should it be forgotten that several liberal
Christians, like Hicks, were friendly towards Paine at the
close of his life, whereas his most malignant enemies were
of his own "Painite" household, Carver and Cheetham. Mr.
William Erving tells me that he remembers an English
clergyman in New York, named Cunningham, who used to visit
his (Erving's) father. He heard him say that Paine and he
were friends; and that "the whole fault was that people
hectored Paine, and made him say things he would never say
to those who treated him as a gentleman."
Paine had no fear of death; Madame Bonneville's narrative shows that his fear was rather of living too long. But he had some such fear as that of Voltaire when entering his house at Fernay after it began to lighten. He was not afraid of the lightning, he said, but of what the neighboring priest would make of it should he be struck. Paine had some reason to fear that the zealots who had placarded the devil flying away with him might fulfil their prediction by body-snatching. His unwillingness to be left alone, ascribed to superstitious terror, was due to efforts to get a recantation from him, so determined that he dare not be without witnesses. He had foreseen this. While living with Jarvis, two years before, he desired him to bear witness that he maintained his theistic convictions to the last. Jarvis merrily proposed that he should make a sensation by a mock recantation, but the author said, "Tom Paine never told a lie." When he knew that his illness was mortal he solemnly reaffirmed these opinions in the presence of Madame Bonneville, Dr. Romaine, Mr. Haskin, Captain Pelton, and Thomas Nixon.* The nurse Hedden, if the Catholic Bishop of Boston (Fenwick) remembered accurately thirty-seven years later, must have conspired to get him into the patient's room, from which, of course, he was stormily expelled. But the Bishop's story is so like a pious novelette that, in the absence of any mention of his visit by Madame Bonneville, herself a Catholic, one cannot be sure that the interview he waited so long to report did not take place in some slumberous episcopal chamber in Boston.**
* Sec the certificate of Nixon and Pelton to Cobbett (Vale,
p. 177).
** Bishop Fenwick's narrative (U. S. Catholic Magazine,
1846) is quoted in the N. Y. Observer\ September 27, 1877.
(Extremes become friends when a freethinker is to be
crucified.)
It was rumored that Paine's adherents were keeping him under the influence of liquor in order that he might not recant,—so convinced, at heart, or enamoured of Calvinism was this martyr of Theism, who had published his "Age of Reason" from the prison where he awaited the guillotine.*