"You have raised an ant-hill about the roots of my sturdy oak, and it may amuse idlers to see your work; but neither its body nor its branches are injured by you; and I hope the shade of my Civic Crown may be able to preserve your little contrivance, at least for the season.
"When you have done as much service to the world by your writings, and suffered as much for them, as I have done, you will be better entitled to dictate: but although I know you to be a keener politician than Paul, I can assure you, from my experience of mankind, that you do not much commend the Christian doctrines to them by announcing that it requires the labour of a learned life to make them understood.
"May I be permitted, after all, to suggest that your truly vigorous talents would be best employed in teaching men to preserve their liberties exclusively,—leaving to that God who made their immortal souls the care of their eternal welfare.
"I am, dear Sir,
"Your true well-wisher,
"Tho. Paine.
"To Gilbert Wakefield, A. B."
After a first perusal of this letter has made its unpleasant impression, the reader will do well to read it again. Paine has repaired to his earliest Norfolk for language appropriate to the coarser tongue of his Nottinghamshire assailant; but it should be said that the offensive paragraph, the first, is a travesty of one written by Wakefield. In his autobiography, after groaning over his books that found no buyers, a veritable "starved apothecary," Wakefield describes the uneasiness caused by his pamphlet on "Religious Worship" as proof that the disease was yielding to his "potion." He says that "as a physician of spiritual maladies" he had seconded "the favourable operation of the first prescription,"—and so forth. Paine, in using the simile, certainly allows the drugs and phials of his sick-room to enter it to a disagreeable extent, but we must bear in mind that we are looking over his shoulder. We must also, by the same consideration of its privacy, mitigate the letter's egotism. Wakefield's ant-hill protected by the foliage, the "civic crown," of Paine's oak which it has attacked,—gaining notice by the importance of the work it belittles,—were admirable if written by another; and the egotism is not without some warrant. It is the rebuke of a scarred veteran of the liberal army to the insults of a subaltern near twenty years his junior. It was no doubt taken to heart For when the agitation which Gilbert Wakefield had contributed to swell, and to lower, presently culminated in handcuffs for the circulators of Paine's works, he was filled with anguish. He vainly tried to resist the oppression, and to call back the Unitarians, who for twenty-five years continued to draw attention from their own heresies by hounding on the prosecution of Paine's adherents.*
* "But I would not forcibly suppress this book ["Age of
Reason">[; much less would I punish (O my God, be such
wickedness far from me, or leave me destitute of thy favour
in the midst of this perjured and sanguinary generation!)
much less would I punish, by fine or imprisonment, from any
possible consideration, the publisher or author of these
pages."—Letter of Gilbert Wakefield to Sir John Scott,
Attorney General, 1798. For evidence of Unitarian
intolerance see the discourse of W, J. Fox on "The Duties of
Christians towards Deists" (Collected Works, vol. i.). In
this discourse, October 24, 1819, on the prosecution of
Carlile for publishing the "Age of Reason," Mr. Fox
expresses his regret that the first prosecution should have
been conducted by a Unitarian. "Goaded," he says, "by the
calumny which would identify them with those who yet reject
the Saviour, they have, in repelling so unjust an
accusation, caught too much of the tone of their opponents,
and given the most undesirable proof of their affinity to
other Christians by that unfairness towards the disbeliever
which does not become any Christian." Ultimately Mr. Fox
became the champion of all the principles of "The Age of
Reason" and "The Rights of Man."
The prig perished; in his place stood a martyr of the freedom bound up with the work he had assailed. Paine's other assailant, the Bishop of Llandaff, having bent before Pitt, and episcopally censured the humane side he once espoused, Gilbert Wakefield answered him with a boldness that brought on him two years' imprisonment When he came out of prison (1801) he was received with enthusiasm by all of Paine's friends, who had forgotten the wrong so bravely atoned for. Had he not died in the same year, at the age of forty-five, Gilbert Wakefield might have become a standard-bearer of the freethinkers.