There are indications of physical feebleness as well as haste in this letter. The spring and summer brought some vigor, but, as we have seen by Monroe's letter to Judge Jones, he sank again and in the autumn seemed nearing his end. Once more the announcement of his death appeared in England, this time bringing joy to the orthodox. From the same quarter, probably, whence issued, in 1793, "Intercepted Correspondence from Satan to Citizen Paine," came now ( 1795 ) a folio sheet: "Glorious News for Old England. The British Lyon rous'd; or John Bull for ever.
"The Fox has lost his Tail
The Ass has done his Braying,
The Devil has got Tom Paine."
Good-hearted as Paine was, it must be admitted that he was cruelly persistent in disappointing these British obituaries. Despite anguish, fever, and abscess—this for more than a year eating into his side,—he did not gratify those prayerful expectations by becoming a monument of divine retribution. Nay, amid all these sufferings he had managed to finish Part Second of the "Age of Reason," write the "Dissertation on Government," and give the Address before the Convention, Nevertheless when, in November, he was near death's door, there came from England tidings grievous enough to crush a less powerful constitution. It was reported that many of his staunchest old friends had turned against him on account of his heretical book. This report seemed to find confirmation in the successive volumes of Gilbert Wakefield in reply to the two Parts of Paine's book. Wakefield held Unitarian opinions, and did not defend the real fortress besieged by Paine. He was enraged that Paine should deal with the authority of the Bible, and the orthodox dogmas, as if they were Christianity, ignoring unorthodox versions altogether. This, however, hardly explains the extreme and coarse vituperation of these replies, which shocked Wakefield's friends.*
* "The office of 'castigation' was unworthy of our friend's
talents, and detrimental to his purpose of persuading
others. Such a contemptuous treatment, even of an unfair
disputant, was also too well calculated to depredate in the
public estimation that benevolence of character by which Mr.
Wakefield was so justly distinguished."—"Life of Gilbert
Wakefield," 1804, ii., p. 33.
Although in his thirty-eighth year at this time, Wakefield was not old enough to escape the sequelæ of his former clericalism. He had been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, afterwards had a congregation, and had continued his connection with the English Church after he was led, by textual criticism, to adopt Unitarian opinions. He had great reputation as a linguist, and wrote Scriptural expositions and retranslations. But few read his books, and he became a tutor in a dissenting college at Hackney, mainly under influence of the Unitarian leaders, Price and Priestley. Wakefield would not condescend to any connection with a dissenting society, and his career at Hackney was marked by arrogant airs towards Unitarians, on account of a university training, then not open to dissenters. He attacked Price and Priestley, his superiors in every respect, apart from their venerable position and services, in a contemptuous way; and, in fact, might be brevetted a prig, with a fondness for coarse phrases, sometimes printed with blanks. He flew at Paine as if he had been waiting for him; his replies, not affecting any vital issue, were displays of linguistic and textual learning, set forth on the background of Paine's page, which he blackened. He exhausts his large vocabulary of vilification on a book whose substantial affirmations he concedes; and it is done in the mean way of appropriating the credit of Paine's arguments.
Gilbert Wakefield was indebted to the excitement raised by Paine for the first notice taken by the general public of anything he ever wrote. Paine, however, seems to have been acquainted with a sort of autobiography which he had published in 1792. In this book Wakefield admitted with shame that he had subscribed the Church formulas when he did not believe them, while indulging in flings at Price, Priestley, and others, who had suffered for their principles. At the same time there were some things in Wakefield's autobiography which could not fail to attract Paine: it severely attacked slavery, and also the whole course of Pitt towards France. This was done with talent and courage. It was consequently a shock when Gilbert Wakefield's outrageous abuse of himself came to the invalid in his sick-room. It appeared to be an indication of the extent to which he was abandoned by the Englishmen who had sympathized with his political principles, and to a large extent with his religious views. This acrimonious repudiation added groans to Paine's sick and sinking heart, some of which were returned upon his Socinian assailant, and in kind. This private letter my reader must see, though it was meant for no eye but that of Gilbert Wakefield. It is dated at Paris, November 19, 1795.
"Dear Sir,—When you prudently chose, like a starved apothecary, to offer your eighteenpenny antidote to those who had taken my two-and-sixpenny Bible-purge,* you forgot that although my dose was rather of the roughest, it might not be the less wholesome for possessing that drastick quality; and if I am to judge of its salutary effects on your infuriate polemic stomach, by the nasty things it has made you bring away, I think you should be the last man alive to take your own panacea. As to the collection of words of which you boast the possession, nobody, I believe, will dispute their amount, but every one who reads your answer to my 'Age of Reason' will wish there were not so many scurrilous ones among them; for though they may be very usefull in emptying your gallbladder they are too apt to move the bile of other people.
* These were the actual prices of the books.
"Those of Greek and Latin are rather foolishly thrown away, I think, on a man like me, who, you are pleased to say, is 'the greatest ignoramus in nature': yet I must take the liberty to tell you, that wisdom does not consist in the mere knowledge of language, but of things.
"You recommend me to know myself—a thing very easy to advise, but very difficult to practice, as I learn from your own book; for you take yourself to be a meek disciple of Christ, and yet give way to passion and pride in every page of its composition.