Another fostered prejudice supposes "The Age of Reason" largely made up of scoffs. The Bishop of Llandaff, in his reply to Paine, was impressed by the elevated Theism of the work, to portions of which he ascribed "a philosophical sublimity." Watson apparently tried to constrain his ecclesiastical position into English fair play, so that his actual failures to do so were especially misleading, as many knew Paine only as represented by this eminent antagonist. For instance, the Bishop says, "Moses you term a coxcomb, etc." But Paine, commenting on Numbers xii., 3, "Moses was very meek, above all men," had argued that Moses could not have written the book, for "If Moses said this of himself he was a coxcomb." Again the Bishop says Paine terms Paul "a fool." But Paine had quoted from Paul, "'Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.' To which [he says] one might reply in his own language, and say, 'Thou fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die not.'"
No intellect that knows the law of literature, that deep answers only unto deep, can suppose that the effect of Paine's "Age of Reason," on which book the thirty years' war for religious freedom in England was won, after many martyrdoms, came from a scoffing or scurrilous work. It is never Paine's object to raise a laugh; if he does so it is because of the miserable baldness of the dogmas, and the ignorant literalism, consecrated in the popular mind of his time. Through page after page he peruses the Heavens, to him silently declaring the glory of God, and it is not laughter but awe when he asks, "From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit, that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple!"
In another work Paine finds allegorical truth in the legend of Eden. The comparative mythlogists of to-day, with many sacred books of the East, can find mystical meaning and beauty in many legends of the Bible wherein Paine could see none, but it is because of their liberation by the rebels of last century from bondage to the pettiness of literalism. Paine sometimes exposes an absurdity with a taste easily questionable by a generation not required like his own to take such things under foot of the letter. But his spirit is never flippant, and the sentences that might so seem to a casual reader are such as Browning defended in his "Christmas Eve."
"If any blames me,
Thinking that merely to touch in brevity
The topics I dwell on, were unlawful—
Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity,
On the bounds of the Holy and the awful,
I praise the heart, and pity the head of him,
And refer myself to Thee, instead of him;
Who head and heart alike discernest,
Looking below light speech we utter,
When the frothy spume and frequent sputter
Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest!"
Even Dr. James Martineau, whose reverential spirit no one can question, once raised a smile in his audience, of which the present writer was one, by saying that the account of the temptation of Jesus, if true, must have been reported by himself, or "by the only other party present." Any allusion to the devil in our day excites a smile. But it was not so in Paine's day, when many crossed themselves while speaking of this dark prince. Paine has "too much respect for the moral character of Christ" to suppose that he told the story of the devil showing him all the kingdoms of the world. "How happened it that he did not discover America; or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any interest?" This is not flippancy; it was by following the inkstand Luther threw at the devil with equally vigorous humor that the grotesque figure was eliminated, leaving the reader of to-day free to appreciate the profound significance of the Temptation.
How free Paine is from any disposition to play to pit or gallery, any more than to dress circle, is shown in his treatment of the Book of Jonah. It is not easy to tell the story without exciting laughter; indeed the proverbial phrases for exaggeration,—"a whale," a "fish story,"—probably came from Jonah. Paine's smile is slight. He says, "it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale"; but this is merely in passing to an argument that miracles, in the early world, would hardly have represented Divinity. Had the fish cast up Jonah in the streets of Nineveh the people would probably have been affrighted, and fancied them both devils. But in the second Part of the work there is a very impressive treatment of the Book of Jonah. This too is introduced with a passing smile—"if credulity could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything." But it is precisely to this supposed "scoffer" that we owe the first interpretation of the profound and pathetic significance of the book, lost sight of in controversies about its miracle. Paine anticipates Baur in pronouncing it a poetical work of Gentile origin. He finds in it the same lesson against intolerance contained in the story of the reproof of Abraham for piously driving the suffering fire-worshipper from his tent. (This story is told by the Persian Saadi, who also refers to Jonah: "And now the whale swallowed Jonah: the sun set.") In the prophet mourning for his withered gourd, while desiring the destruction of a city, Paine finds a satire; in the divine rebuke he hears the voice of a true God, and one very different from the deity to whom the Jews ascribed massacres. The same critical acumen is shown in his treatment of the Book of Job, which he believes to be also of Gentile origin, and much admires.
The large Paine Mythology cleared aside, he who would learn the truth about this religious teacher will find in his way a misleading literature of uncritical eulogies. Indeed the pious prejudices against Paine have largely disappeared, as one may see by comparing the earlier with the later notices of him in religious encyclopaedias. But though he is no longer placed in an infernal triad as in the old hymn—"The world, the devil, and Tom Paine"—and his political services are now candidly recognized, he is still regarded as the propagandist of a bald illiterate deism. This, which is absurdly unhistorical, Paine having been dealt with by eminent critics of his time as an influence among the educated, is a sequel to his long persecution. For he was relegated to the guardianship of an unlearned and undiscriminating radicalism, little able to appreciate the niceties of his definitions, and was gilded by its defensive commonplaces into a figurehead. Paine therefore has now to be saved from his friends more perhaps than from his enemies. It has been shown on a former page that his governmental theories were of a type peculiar in his time. Though such writers as Spencer, Frederic Harrison, Bagehot, and Dicey have familiarized us with his ideas, few of them have the historic perception which enables Sir George Trevelyan to recognize Paine's connection with them. It must now be added that Paine's religion was of a still more peculiar type. He cannot be classed with deists of the past or theists of the present. Instead of being the mere iconoclast, the militant assailant of Christian beliefs, the "infidel" of pious slang, which even men who should know better suppose, he was an exact thinker, a slow and careful writer, and his religious ideas, developed through long years, require and repay study.
The dedication of "The Age of Reason" places the work under the "protection" of its authors fellow-citizens of the United States. To-day the trust comes to many who really are such as Paine supposed all of his countrymen to be,—just and independent lovers of truth and right. We shall see that his trust was not left altogether unfulfilled by a multitude of his contemporaries, though they did not venture to do justice to the man. Paine had idealized his countrymen, looking from his prison across three thousand miles. But, to that vista of space, a century of time had to be added before the book which fanatical Couthon suppressed, and the man whom murderous Barrère sentenced to death, could both be fairly judged by educated America.
"The Age of Reason" is in two Parts, published in successive years. These divisions are interesting as memorials of the circumstances under which they were written and published,—in both cases with death evidently at hand. But taking the two Parts as one work, there appears to my own mind a more real division: a part written by Paine's century, and another originating from himself. Each of these has an important and traceable evolution.
I. The first of these divisions may be considered, fundementally, as a continuation of the old revolution against arbitrary authority. Carlyle's humor covers a profound insight when he remarks that Paine, having freed America with his "Common Sense," was resolved to free this whole world, and perhaps the other! All the authorities were and are interdependent. "If thou release this man thou art not Cæsar's friend," cried the Priest to Pilate. The proconsul must face the fact that in Judea Cæsarism rests on the same foundation with Jahvism. Authority leans on authority; none can stand alone. It is still a question whether political revolutions cause or are caused by religious revolutions. Buckle maintained that the French Revolution was chiefly due to the previous overthrow of spiritual authority; Rocquain, that the political régime was shaken before the philosophers arose.* In England religious changes seem to have usually followed those of a political character, not only in order of time, but in character. In beginning the "Age of Reason," Paine says: