Thus Paine, pioneer in many things, helped to found the first theistic and ethical society.

It may now be recognized as a foundation of the Religion of Humanity. It was a great point with Paine that belief in the divine existence was the one doctrine common to all religions. On this rock the Church of Man was to be built Having vainly endeavored to found the international Republic he must repair to an ideal moral and human world. Robespierre and Pitt being unfraternal he will bring into harmony the sages of all races. It is a notable instance of Paine's unwillingness to bring a personal grievance into the sacred presence of Humanity that one of the four festivals of Theophilanthropy was in honor of Washington, while its catholicity was represented in a like honor to St. Vincent de Paul. The others so honored were Socrates and Rousseau. These selections were no doubt mainly due to the French members, but they could hardly have been made without Paine's agreement. It is creditable to them all that, at a time when France believed itself wronged by Washington, his services to liberty should alone have been remembered. The flowers of all races, as represented in literature or in history, found emblematic association with the divine life in nature through the flowers that were heaped on a simple altar, as they now are in many churches and chapels. The walls were decorated with ethical mottoes, enjoining domestic kindness and public benevolence.

Paine's pamphlet of this year (1797) on "Agrarian Justice" should be considered part of the theophil-anthropic movement. It was written as a proposal to the French government, at a time when readjustment of landed property had been rendered necessary by the Revolution.*

It was suggested by a sermon printed by the Bishop of Llandaff, on "The wisdom and goodness of God in having made both rich and poor." Paine denies that God made rich and poor: "he made only male and female, and gave them the earth for their inheritance." The earth, though naturally the equal possession of all, has been necessarily appropriated by individuals, because their improvements, which alone render its productiveness adequate to human needs, cannot be detached from the soil. Paine maintains that these private owners do nevertheless owe mankind ground-rent. He therefore proposes a tithe,—not for God, but for man. He advises that at the time when the owner will feel it least,—when property is passing by inheritance from one to another,—the tithe shall be taken from it. Personal property also owes a debt to society, without which wealth could not exist,—as in the case of one alone on an island. By a careful estimate he estimates that a tithe on inheritances would give every person, on reaching majority, fifteen pounds, and after the age of fifty an annuity of ten pounds, leaving a substantial surplus for charity. The practical scheme submitted is enforced by practical rather than theoretical considerations. Property is always imperilled by poverty, especially where wealth and splendor have lost their old fascinations, and awaken emotions of disgust.

"To remove the danger it is necessary to remove the antipathies, and this can only be done by making property productive of a national blessing, extending to every individual When the riches of one man above another shall increase the national fund in the same proportion; when it shall be seen that the prosperity of that fund depends on the prosperity of individuals; when the more riches a man acquires, the better it shall be for the general mass; it is then that antipathies will cease, and property be placed on the permanent basis of national interest and protection.

"I have no property in France to become subject to the plan I propose. What I have, which is not much, is in the United States of America. But I will pay one hundred pounds sterling towards this fund in France, the instant it shall be established; and I will pay the same sum in England, whenever a similar establishment shall take place in that country."

The tithe was to be given to rich and poor alike, including owners of the property tithed, in order that there should be no association of alms with this "agrarian justice."

About this time the priesthood began to raise their heads again. A report favorable to a restoration to them of the churches, the raising of bells, and some national recognition of public worship, was made by Camille Jordan for a committee on the subject The Jesuitical report was especially poetical about church bells, which Paine knew would ring the knell of the Republic. He wrote a theophilanthropic letter to Camille Jordan, from which I quote some paragraphs.

"You claim a privilege incompatible with the Constitution, and with Rights. The Constitution protects equally, as it ought to do, every profession of religion; it gives no exclusive privilege to any. The churches are the common property of all the people; they are national goods, and cannot be given exclusively to any one profession, because the right does not exist of giving to any one that which appertains to all. It would be consistent with right that the churches should be sold, and the money arising therefrom be invested as a fund for the education of children of poor parents of every profession, and, if more than sufficient for this purpose, that the surplus be appropriated to the support of the aged poor. After this every profession can erect its own place of worship, if it choose—support its own priests, if it choose to have any—or perform its worship without priests, as the Quakers do."

"It is a want of feeling to talk of priests and bells whilst so many infants are perishing in the hospitals, and aged and infirm poor in the streets. The abundance that France possesses is sufficient for every want, if rightly applied; but priests and bells, like articles of luxury, ought to be the least articles of consideration."

"No man ought to make a living by religion. It is dishonest to do so. Religion is not an act that can be performed by proxy. One person cannot act religion for another. Every person must perform it for himself; and all that a priest can do is to take from him; he wants nothing but his money, and then to riot in the spoil and laugh at his credulity. The only people who, as a professional sect of Christians, provide for the poor of their society, are people known by the name of Quakers. These men have no priests. They assemble quietly in their places of worship, and do not disturb their neighbors with shows and noise of bells. Religion does not unite itself to show and noise. True religion is without either.'

"One good schoolmaster is of more use than a hundred priests. If we look back at what was the condition of France under the ancien rÉgime we cannot acquit the priests of corrupting the morals of the nation."

"Why has the Revolution of France been stained with crimes, while the Revolution of the United States of America was not? Men are physically the same in all countries; it is education that makes them different. Accustom a people to believe that priests, or any other class of men, can forgive sins, and you will have sins in abundance."

While Thomas Paine was thus founding; in Paris a religion of love to God expressed in love to man, his enemies in England were illustrating by characteristic fruits the dogmas based on a human sacrifice. The ascendency of the priesthood of one church over others, which he was resisting in France, was exemplified across the channel in the prosecution of his publisher, and the confiscation of a thousand pounds which had somehow fallen due to Paine.* The "Age of Reason," amply advertised by its opponents, had reached a vast circulation, and a prosecution of its publisher, Thomas Williams, for blasphemy, was instituted in the King's Bench. Williams being a poor man, the defence was sustained by a subscription.**

The trial occurred June 24th. The extent to which the English reign of terror had gone was shown in the fact that Erskine was now the prosecutor; he who five years before had defended the "Rights of Man," who had left the court in a carriage drawn by the people, now stood in the same room to assail the most sacred of rights. He began with a menace to the defendant's counsel (S. Kyd) on account of a notice served on the prosecution, foreshadowing a search into the Scriptures.*

"No man," he cried, "deserves to be upon the Rolls of the Court who dares, as an Attorney, to put his name to such a notice. It is an insult to the authority and dignity of the Court of which he is an officer; since it seems to call in question the very foundations of its jurisdiction." So soon did Erskine point the satire of the fable he quoted from Lucian, in Paine's defence, of Jupiter answering arguments with thunderbolts. Erskine's argument was that the King had taken a solemn oath "to maintain the Christian Religion as it is promulgated by God in the Holy Scriptures." "Every man has a right to investigate, with modesty and decency, controversial points of the Christian religion; but no man, consistently with a law which only exists under its sanction, has a right not only broadly to deny its very existence, but to pour forth a shocking and insulting invective, etc." The law, he said, permits, by a like principle, the intercourse between the sexes to be set forth in plays and novels, but punishes such as "address the imagination in a manner to lead the passions into dangerous excesses." Erskine read several passages from the "Age of Reason," which, their main point being omitted, seemed mere aimless abuse. In his speech, he quoted as Paine's words of his own collocation, representing the author as saying, "The Bible teaches nothing but 'lies, obscenity, cruelty, and injustice.'" This is his entire and inaccurate rendering of what Paine,—who always distinguishes the "Bible" from the "New Testament,"—says at the close of his comment on the massacre of the Midianites and appropriation of their maidens:

"People in general know not what wickedness there is in this pretended word of God. Brought up in habits of superstition, they take it for granted that the Bible [Old Testament] is true, and that it is good; they permit themselves not to doubt it; and they carry the ideas they form of the benevolence of the Almighty to the book they have been taught to believe was written by his authority. Good heavens! it is quite another thing! it is a book of lies, wickedness, and blasphemy; for what can be greater blasphemy than to ascribe the wickedness of man to the orders of the Almighty?"

Erskine argued that the sanction of Law was the oath by which judges, juries, witnesses administered law and justice under a belief in "the revelation of the unutterable blessings which shall attend their observances, and the awful punishments which shall await upon their transgressions." The rest of his opening argument was, mainly, that great men had believed in Christianity.

Mr. Kyd, in replying, quoted from the Bishop of Llandaff's "Answer to Gibbon": "I look upon the right of private judgment, in every respect concerning God and ourselves, as superior to the control of human authority"; and his claim that the Church of England is distinguished from Mahometanism and Romanism by its permission of every man to utter his opinion freely. He also cites Dr. Lardner, and Dr. Waddington, the Bishop of Chichester, who declared that Woolston "ought not to be punished for being an infidel, nor for writing against the Christian religion." He quoted Paine's profession of faith on the first page of the incriminated book: "I believe in one God and no more; I hope for happiness, beyond this life; I believe in the equality of men, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy." He also quoted Paine's homage to the character of Jesus. He defied the prosecution to find in the "Age of Reason" a single passage "inconsistent with the most chaste, the most correct system of morals," and declared the very passages selected for indictment pleas against obscenity and cruelty. Mr. Kyd pointed out fourteen narratives in the Bible (such as Sarah giving Hagar to Abraham, Lot and his daughters, etc.) which, if found in any other book, would be pronounced obscene. He was about to enumerate instances of cruelty when the judge, Lord Kenyon, indignantly interrupted him, and with consent of the jury said he could only allow him to cite such passages without reading them. (Mr. Kyd gratefully acknowledged this release from the "painful task" of reading such horrors from the "Word of God"!) One of the interesting things about this trial was the disclosure of the general reliance on Butler's "Analogy," used by Bishop Watson in his reply to Paine,—namely, that the cruelties objected to in the God of the Bible are equally found in nature, through which deists look up to their God. When Kyd, after quoting from Bishop Watson, said, "Gentlemen, observe the weakness of this answer," Lord Kenyon exclaimed: "I cannot sit in this place and hear this kind of discussion." Kyd said: "My Lord, I stand here on the privilege of an advocate in an English Court of Justice: this man has applied to me to defend him; I have undertaken his defence; and I have often heard your Lordship declare, that every man had a right to be defended. I know no other mode by which I can seriously defend him against this charge, than that which I am now pursuing; if your Lordship wish to prevent me from pursuing it, you may as well tell me to abandon my duty to my client at once." Lord Kenyon said: "Go on, Sir." Returning to the analogy of the divinely ordered massacres in the Bible with the like in nature, Kyd said:

"Gentlemen, this is reasoning by comparison; and reasoning by comparison is often fallacious. On the present occasion the fallacy is this: that, in the first case, the persons perish by the operation of the general laws of nature, not suffering punishment for a crime; whereas, in the latter, the general laws of nature are suspended or transgressed, and God commands the slaughter to avenge his offended will. Is this then a satisfactory answer to the objection? I think it is not; another may think so too; which it may be fairly supposed the Author did; and then the objection, as to him, remains in full force, and he cannot, from insisting upon it, be fairly accused of malevolent intention."

In his answer Erskine said: "The history of man is the history of man's vices and passions, which could not be censured without adverting to their existence; many of the instances that have been referred to were recorded as memorable warnings and examples for the instruction of mankind." But for this argument Erskine was indebted to his old client, Paine, who did not argue against the things being recorded, but against the belief "that the inhuman and horrid butcheries of men, women, and children, told of in those books, were done, as those books say they were done, at the command of God." Paine says: "Those accounts are nothing to us, nor to any other persons, unless it be to the Jews, as a part of the history of their nation; and there is just as much of the word of God in those books as there is in any of the histories of France, or Rapin's 'History of England,' or the history of any other country."

As in Paines own trial in 1792, the infallible scheme of a special jury was used against Williams. Lord Kenyon closed his charge with the words: "Unless it was for the most malignant purposes, I cannot conceive how it was published. It is, however, for you to judge of it, and to do justice between the Public and the Defendant."

"The jury instantly found the Defendant—Guilty."

Paine at once wrote a letter to Erskine, which was first printed in Paris. He calls attention to the injustice of the special jury system, in which all the jurymen are nominated by the crown. In London a special jury generally consists of merchants. "Talk to some London merchants about scripture, and they will understand you mean scrip, and tell you how much it is worth at the Stock Exchange. Ask them about Theology, and they will say they know no such gentleman upon 'Change." He also declares that Lord Kenyon's course in preventing Mr. Kyd from reading passages from the Bible was irregular, and contrary to words, which he cites, used by the same judge in another case.

This Letter to Erskine contains some effective passages. In one of these he points out the sophistical character of the indictment in declaring the "Age of Reason" a blasphemous work, tending to bring in contempt the holy scriptures. "The charge should have stated that the work was intended to prove certain books not the holy scriptures. It is one thing if I ridicule a work as being written by a certain person; but it is quite a different thing if I write to prove that such a work was not written by such person. In the first case I attack the person through the work; in the other case I defend the honour of the person against the work." After alluding to the two accounts in Genesis of the creation of man, according to one of which there was no Garden of Eden and no forbidden tree, Paine says:

"Perhaps I shall be told in the cant language of the day, as I have often been told by the Bishop of Llandaff and others, of the great and laudable pains that many pious and learned men have taken to explain the obscure, and reconcile the contradictory, or, as they say, the seemingly contradictory passages of the Bible. It is because the Bible needs such an undertaking, that is one of the first causes to suspect it is not the word of God: this single reflection, when carried home to the mind, is in itself a volume. What! does not the Creator of the Universe, the Fountain of all Wisdom, the Origin of all Science, the Author of all Knowledge, the God of Order and of Harmony, know how to write? When we contemplate the vast economy of the creation, when we behold the unerring regularity of the visible solar system, the perfection with which all its several parts revolve, and by corresponding assemblage form a whole;—when we launch our eye into the boundless ocean of space, and see ourselves surrounded by innumerable worlds, not one of which varies from its appointed place—when we trace the power of a Creator, from a mite to an elephant, from an atom to an universe, can we suppose that the mind [which] could conceive such a design, and the power that executed it with incomparable perfection, cannot write without inconsistence; or that a book so written can be the work of such a power? The writings of Thomas Paine, even of Thomas Paine, need no commentator to explain, compound, arrange, and re-arrange their several parts, to render them intelligible—he can relate a fact, or write an essay, without forgetting in one page what he has written in another; certainly then, did the God of all perfection condescend to write or dictate a book, that book would be as perfect as himself is perfect: The Bible is not so, and it is confessedly not so, by the attempts to mend it."

Paine admonishes Erskine that a prosecution to preserve God's word, were it really God's word, would be like a prosecution to prevent the sun from falling out of heaven; also that he should be able to comprehend that the motives of those who declare the Bible not God's word are religious. He then gives him an account of the new church of Theophilanthropists in Paris, and appends his discourse before that society.

In the following year, Paine's discourse to the Theophilanthropists was separately printed by Clio Rickman, with a sentence from Shakespeare in the title-page: "I had as lief have the foppery of freedom as the morality of imprisonment" There was also the following dedication:

"The following little Discourse is dedicated to the enemies of Thomas Paine, by one who has known him long and intimately, and who is convinced that he is the enemy of no man. It is printed to do good, by a well wisher to the world. By one who thinks that discussion should be unlimited, that all coercion is error; and that human beings should adopt no other conduct towards each other but an appeal to truth and reason."

Paine wrote privately, in the same sense as to Erskine, to his remonstrating friends. In one such letter (May 12th) he goes again partly over the ground. "You," he says, "believe in the Bible from the accident of birth, and the Turks believe in the Koran from the same accident, and each calls the other infidel. This answer to your letter is not written for the purpose of changing your opinion. It is written to satisfy you, and some other friends whom I esteem, that my disbelief of the Bible is founded on a pure and religious belief in God." "All are infidels who believe falsely of God." "Belief in a cruel God makes a cruel man."

Paine had for some time been attaining unique fame in England. Some publisher had found it worth while to issue a book, entitled "Tom Paine's Jests: Being an entirely new and select Collection of Patriotic Bon Mots, Repartees, Anecdotes, Epigrams, &c, on Political Subjects. By Thomas Paine." There are hardly a half dozen items by Paine in the book (72 pages), which shows that his name was considered marketable. The government had made the author a cause. Erskine, who had lost his office as Attorney-General for the Prince of Wales by becoming Paine's counsel in 1792, was at once taken back into favor after prosecuting the "Age of Reason," and put on his way to become Lord Erskine. The imprisonment of Williams caused a reaction in the minds of those who had turned against Paine. Christianity suffered under royal patronage. The terror manifested at the name of Paine—some were arrested even for showing his portrait—was felt to be political. None of the aristocratic deists, who wrote for the upper classes, were dealt with in the same way. Paine had proclaimed from the housetops what, as Dr. Watson confessed, scholars were whispering in the ear. There were lampoons of Paine, such as those of Peter Pindar (Rev. John Wolcott), but they only served to whet popular curiosity concerning him.* The "Age of Reason" had passed through several editions before it was outlawed, and every copy of it passed through many hands. From the prosecution and imprisonment of Williams may be dated the consolidation of the movement for the "Rights of Man," with antagonism to the kind of Christianity which that injustice illustrated. Political liberalism and heresy thenceforth progressed in England, hand in hand.

"'Tommy Paine wrote this book to prove that the bible Was an old woman's dream of fancies most idle; That Solomon's proverbs were made by low livers, That prophets were fellows who sang semiquavers; That religion and miracles all were a jest, And the devil in torment a tale of the priest. Though Beelzebub's absence from hell I 'll maintain! Yet we all must allow that the Devil's in Paine.'"