* Curiously enough, Mary (Roscoe) Hinsdale turned up again.
She had broken down under the cross-examination of William
Cobbett, but he had long been out of the country when the
Quaker separation took place. Mary now reported that a
distinguished member of the Hicksite Society, Mary Lock
wood, had recanted in the same way as Paine. This being
proved false, the hysterical Mary sank and remained in
oblivion, from which she is recalled only by the Rev. Rip
Van Winkle. It was the unique sentence on Paine to recant
and yet be damned. This honor belies the indifference
expressed in the rune taught children sixty years ago:
"Poor Tom Paine! there he lies:
Nobody laughs and nobody cries:
Where he has gone or how he fares,
Nobody knows and nobody cares!"

I told Walt Whitman, himself partly a product of Hicksite Quakerism, of the conclusion to which I had been steadily drawn, that Thomas Paine rose again in Elias Hicks, and was in some sort the origin of our one American religion. I said my visit was mainly to get his "testimony" on the subject for my book, as he was born in Hicks' region, and mentions in "Specimen Days" his acquaintance with Paine's friend, Colonel Fellows. Walt said, for I took down his words at the time:

"In my childhood a great deal was said of Paine in our neighborhood, in Long Island. My father, Walter Whitman, was rather favorable to Paine. I remember hearing Elias Hicks preach; and his look, slender figure, earnestness, made an impression on me, though I was only about eleven. He died in 1830. He is well represented in the bust there, one of my treasures. I was a young man when I enjoyed the friendship of Col. Fellows,—then a constable of the courts; tall, with ruddy face, blue eyes, snowy hair, and a fine voice; neat in dress, an old-school gentleman, with a military air, who used to awe the crowd by his looks; they used to call him 'Aristides.' I used to chat with him in Tammany Hall. It was a time when, in religion, there was as yet no philosophical middle-ground; people were very strong on one side or the other; there was a good deal of lying, and the liars were often well paid for their work. Paine and his principles made the great issue. Paine was double-damnably lied about. Col. Fellows was a man of perfect truth and exactness; he assured me that the stories disparaging to Paine personally were quite false. Paine was neither drunken nor filthy; he drank as other people did, and was a high-minded gentleman. I incline to think you right in supposing a connection between the Paine excitement and the Hicksite movement. Paine left a deep, clear-cut impression on the public mind. Col. Fellows told me that while Paine was in New York he had a much larger following than was generally supposed. After his death a reaction in his favor appeared among many who had opposed him, and this reaction became exceedingly strong between 1820 and 1830, when the division among the Quakers developed. Probably William Cobbett's conversion to Paine had something to do with it. Cobbett lived in the neighborhood of Elias Hicks, in Long Island, and probably knew him. Hicks was a fair-minded man, and no doubt read Paine's books carefully and honestly. I am very glad you are writing the Life of Paine. Such a book has long been needed. Paine was among the best and truest of men."

Paine's risen soul went marching on in England also. The pretended recantation proclaimed there was exploded by William Cobbett, and the whole controversy over Paine's works renewed. One after another deist was sent to prison for publishing Paine's works, the last being Richard Carlile and his wife. In 1819, the year in which William Cobbett carried Paine's bones to England, Richard Carlile and his wife, solely for this offence, were sent to prison,—he for three years, with fine of £1,500, she for two years, with fine of £500,* This was a suicidal victory for bigotry. When these two came out of prison they found that wealthy gentlemen had provided for them an establishment in Fleet Street, where these books were thenceforth sold unmolested. Mrs. Carlile's petition to the House of Commons awakened that body and the whole country. When Richard Carlile entered prison it was as a captive deist; when he came out the freethinkers of England were generally atheists.

* I have before me an old fly-leaf picture, issued by
Carlile in the same year. It shows Paine in his chariot
advancing against Superstition. Superstition is a snaky-
haired demoness, with poison-cup in one hand and dagger in
the other, surrounded by instruments of torture, and
treading on a youth. Behind her are priests, with mask,
crucifix, and dagger. Burning faggots surround them with a
cloud, behind which are worshippers around an idol, with a
priest near by, upholding a crucifix before a man burning at
the stake. Attended by fair genii, who uphold a banner
inscribed, "Moral Rectitude." Paine advances, uplifting in
one hand the mirror of Truth, in the other his "Age of
Reason." There are ten stanzas describing the conflict,
Superstition being described as holding
"in vassalage a doating World,
Till Paine and Reason burst upon the mind,
And Truth and Deism their flag unfurled."

But what was this atheism? Merely another Declaration of Independence. Common sense and common justice were entering into religion as they were entering into government. Such epithets as "atheism," "infidelity," were but labels of outlawry which the priesthood of all denominations pronounced upon men who threatened their throne, precisely as "sedition" was the label of outlawry fixed by Pitt on all hostility to George III. In England, atheism was an insurrection of justice against any deity diabolical enough to establish the reign of terror in that country or any deity worshipped by a church which imprisoned men for their opinions. Paine was a theist, but he arose legitimately in his admirer Shelley, who was punished for atheism. Knightly service was done by Shelley in the struggle for the Englishman's right to read Paine. If any enlightened religious man of to-day had to choose between the godlessness of Shelley and the godliness that imprisoned good men for their opinions, he would hardly select the latter. The genius of Paine was in every word of Shelley's letter to Lord Ellenborough on the punishment of Eaton for publishing the "Age of Reason."*

* "Whence is any right derived, but that which power
confers, for persecution? Do you think to convert Mr. Eaton
to your religion by embittering his existence? You might
force him by torture to profess your tenets, but he could
not believe them except you should make them credible, which
perhaps exceeds your power. Do you think to please the God
you worship by this exhibition of your zeal? If so the
demon to whom some nations offer human hecatombs is less
barbarous than the Deity of civilized society.... Does
the Christian God, whom his followers eulogize as the deity
of humility and peace—he, the regenerator of the world, the
meek reformer—authorise one man to rise against another,
and, because lictors are at his beck, to chain and torture
him as an infidel? When the Apostles went abroad to convert
the nations, were they enjoined to stab and poison all who
disbelieved the divinity of Christ's mission?... The
time is rapidly approaching—I hope that you, my Lord, may
live to behold its arrival—when the Mahometan, the Jew, the
Christian, the Deist, and the Atheist will live together in
one community, equally sharing the benefits which arrive
from its association, and united in the bonds of charity and
brotherly love."

In America "atheism" was never anything but the besom which again and again has cleared the human mind of phantasms represented in outrages on honest thinkers. In Paine's time the phantasm which was called Jehovah represented a grossly ignorant interpretation of the Bible; the revelation of its monstrous character, represented in the hatred, slander, falsehood, meanness, and superstition, which Jarvis represented as crows and vultures hovering near the preachers kicking Paine's dead body, necessarily destroyed the phantasm, whose pretended power was proved nothing more than that of certain men to injure a man who out-reasoned them. Paine's fidelity to his unanswered argument was fatal to the consecrated phantasm. It was confessed to be ruling without reason, right, or humanity, like the King from whom "Common Sense," mainly, had freed America, and not by any "Grace of God" at all, but through certain reverend Lord Norths and Lord Howes. Paine's peaceful death, the benevolent distribution of his property by a will affirming his Theism, represented a posthumous and potent conclusion to the "Age of Reason."

Paine had aimed to form in New York a Society for Religious Inquiry, also a Society of Theophilan-thropy. The latter was formed, and his posthumous works first began to appear, shortly after his death, in an organ called The Theophilanthropist.

But his movement was too cosmopolitan to be contained in any local organization. "Thomas Paine," said President Andrew Jackson to Judge Hertell, "Thomas Paine needs no monument made by hands; he has erected a monument in the hearts of all lovers of liberty." The like may be said of his religion: Theophilanthropy, under a hundred translations and forms, is now the fruitful branch of every religion and every sect. The real cultivators of skepticism,—those who ascribe to deity biblical barbarism, and the savagery of nature,—have had their day.