The opening year 1806 found Paine in New Rochelle. By insufficient nourishment in Carver's house his health was impaired. His means were getting low, insomuch that to support the Bonnevilles he had to sell the Bordentown house and property.*

Elihu Palmer had gone off to Philadelphia for a time; he died there of yellow fever in 1806. The few intelligent people whom Paine knew were much occupied, and he was almost without congenial society. His hint to Jefferson of his impending poverty, and his reminder that Virginia had not yet given him the honorarium he and Madison approved, had brought no result. With all this, and the loss of early friendships, and the theological hornet-nest he had found in New York, Paine began to feel that his return to America was a mistake.

The air-castle that had allured him to his beloved land had faded. His little room with the Bonnevilles in Paris, with its chaos of papers, was preferable; for there at least he could enjoy the society of educated persons, free from bigotry. He dwelt a stranger in his Land of Promise.

So he resolved to try and free himself from his depressing environment. He would escape to Europe again. Jefferson had offered him a ship to return in, perhaps he would now help him to get back. So he writes (Jan. 30th) a letter to the President, pointing out the probabilities of a crisis in Europe which must result in either a descent on England by Bonaparte, or in a treaty. In the case that the people of England should be thus liberated from tyranny, he (Paine) desired to share with his friends there the task of framing a republic. Should there be, on the other hand, a treaty of peace, it would be of paramount interest to American shipping that such treaty should include that maritime compact, or safety of the seas for neutral ships, of which Paine had written so much, and which Jefferson himself had caused to be printed in a pamphlet. Both of these were, therefore, Paine's subjects. "I think," he says, "you will find it proper, perhaps necessary, to send a person to France in the event of either a treaty or a descent, and I make you an offer of my services on that occasion to join Mr. Monroe.... As I think that the letters of a friend to a friend have some claim to an answer, it will be agreeable to me to receive an answer to this, but without any wish that you should commit yourself, neither can you be a judge of what is proper or necessary to be done till about the month of April or May."

This little dream must also vanish. Paine must face the fact that his career is ended.

It is probable that Elihu Palmer's visit to Philadelphia was connected with some theistic movement in that city. How it was met, and what annoyances Paine had to suffer, are partly intimated in the following letter, printed in the Philadelphia Commercial Advertiser, February 10, 1806.

"To John Inskeep, Mayor of the City of Philadelphia.

"I saw in the Aurora of January the 30th a piece addressed to you and signed Isaac Hall. It contains a statement of your malevolent conduct in refusing to let him have Vine-st. Wharf after he had bid fifty dollars more rent for it than another person had offered, and had been unanimously approved of by the Commissioners appointed by law for that purpose. Among the reasons given by you for this refusal, one was, that 'Mr Hall was one of Paine's disciples.' If those whom you may chuse to call my disciples follow my example in doing good to mankind, they will pass the confines of this world with a happy mind, while the hope of the hypocrite shall perish and delusion sink into despair.

"I do not know who Mr. Inskeep is, for I do not remember the name of Inskeep at Philadelphia in 'the time that tried men's souls.* He must be some mushroom of modern growth that has started up on the soil which the generous services of Thomas Paine contributed to bless with freedom; neither do I know what profession of religion he is of, nor do I care, for if he is a man malevolent and unjust, it signifies not to what class or sectary he may hypocritically belong.

"As I set too much value on my time to waste it on a man of so little consequence as yourself, I will close this short address with a declaration that puts hypocrisy and malevolence to defiance. Here it is: My motive and object in all my political works, beginning with Common Sense, the first work I ever published, have been to rescue man from tyranny and false systems and false principles of government, and enable him to be free, and establish government for himself; and I have borne my share of danger in Europe and in America in every attempt I have made for this purpose. And my motive and object in all my publications on religious subjects, beginning with the first part of the Age of Reason, have been to bring man to a right reason that God has given him; to impress on him the great principles of divine morality, justice, mercy, and a benevolent disposition to all men and to all creatures; and to excite in him a spirit of trust, confidence and consolation in his creator, unshackled by the fable and fiction of books, by whatever invented name they may be called. I am happy in the continual contemplation of what I have done, and I thank God that he gave me talents for the purpose and fortitude to do it It will make the continual consolation of my departing hours, whenever they finally arrive.

"Thomas Paine."

"'These are the times that try men's souls.' Crisis No. 1, written while on the retreat with the army from fort Lee to the Delaware and published in Philadelphia in the dark days of 1776 December the 19th, six days before the taking of the Hessians at Trenton."

But the year 1806 had a heavier blow yet to inflict on Paine, and it naturally came, though in a roundabout way, from his old enemy Gouverneur Morris. While at New Rochelle, Paine offered his vote at the election, and it was refused, on the ground that he was not an American citizen! The supervisor declared that the former American Minister, Gouverneur Morris, had refused to reclaim him from a French prison because he was not an American, and that Washington had also refused to reclaim him. Gouverneur Morris had just lost his seat in Congress, and was politically defunct, but his ghost thus rose on poor Paine's pathway. The supervisor who disfranchised the author of "Common Sense" had been a "Tory" in the Revolution; the man he disfranchised was one to whom the President of the United States had written, five years before: "I am in hopes you will find us returned generally to sentiments worthy of former times. In these it will be your glory to have steadily labored, and with as much effect as any man living." There was not any question of Paine's qualification as a voter on other grounds than the supervisor (Elisha Ward) raised. More must presently be said concerning this incident. Paine announced his intention of suing the inspectors, but meanwhile he had to leave the polls in humiliation. It was the fate of this founder of republics to be a monument of their ingratitude. And now Paine's health began to fail. An intimation of this appears in a letter to Andrew A. Dean, to whom his farm at New Rochelle was let, dated from New York, August, 1806. It is in reply to a letter from Dean on a manuscript which Paine had lent him.*

"Respected Friend: I received your friendly letter, for which I am obliged to you. It is three weeks ago to day (Sunday, Aug. 15,) that I was struck with a fit of an apoplexy, that deprived me of all sense and motion. I had neither pulse nor breathing, and the people about me supposed me dead. I had felt exceedingly well that day, and had just taken a slice of bread and butter for supper, and was going to bed. The fit took me on the stairs, as suddenly as if I had been shot through the head; and I got so very much hurt by the fall, that I have not been able to get in and out of bed since that day, otherwise than being lifted out in a blanket, by two persons; yet all this while my mental faculties have remained as perfect as I ever enjoyed them. I consider the scene I have passed through as an experiment on dying, and I find death has no terrors for me. As to the people called Christians, they have no evidence that their religion is true. There is no more proof that the Bible is the word of God, than that the Koran of Mahomet is the word of God. It is education makes all the difference. Man, before he begins to think for himself, is as much the child of habit in Creeds as he is in ploughing and sowing. Yet creeds, like opinions, prove nothing. Where is the evidence that the person called Jesus Christ is the begotten Son of God? The case admits not of evidence either to our senses or our mental faculties: neither has God given to man any talent by which such a thing is comprehensible. It cannot therefore be an object for faith to act upon, for faith is nothing more than an assent the mind gives to something it sees cause to believe is fact. But priests, preachers, and fanatics, put imagination in the place of faith, and it is the nature of the imagination to believe without evidence. If Joseph the carpenter dreamed (as the book of Matthew, chapter 1st, says he did,) that his betrothed wife, Mary, was with child by the Holy Ghost, and that an angel told him so, I am not obliged to put faith in his dream; nor do I put any, for I put no faith in my own dreams, and I should be weak and foolish indeed to put faith in the dreams of others.—The Christian religion is derogatory to the Creator in all its articles. It puts the Creator in an inferior point of view, and places the Christian Devil above him. It is he, according to the absurd story in Genesis, that outwits the Creator, in the garden of Eden, and steals from him his favorite creature, man; and, at last, obliges him to beget a son, and put that son to death, to get man back again. And this the priests of the Christian religion, call redemption.

"Christian authors exclaim against the practice of offering human sacrifices, which, they say, is done in some countries; and those authors make those exclamations without ever reflecting that their own doctrine of salvation is founded on a human sacrifice. They are saved, they say, by the blood of Christ. The Christian religion begins with a dream and ends with a murder.

"As I am well enough to sit up some hours in the day, though not well enough to get up without help, I employ myself as I have always done, in endeavoring to bring man to the right use of the reason that God has given him, and to direct his mind immediately to his Creator, and not to fanciful secondary beings called mediators, as if God was superannuated or ferocious.

"As to the book called the Bible, it is blasphemy to call it the word of God. It is a book of lies and contradictions, and a history of bad times and bad men. There are but a few good characters in the whole book. The fable of Christ and his twelve apostles, which is a parody on the sun and the twelve signs of the Zodiac, copied from the ancient religions of the eastern world, is the least hurtful part. Every thing told of Christ has reference to the sun. His reported resurrection is at sunrise, and that on the first day of the week; that is, on the day anciently dedicated to the sun, and from thence called Sunday; in latin Dies Solis, the day of the sun; as the next day, Monday, is Moon day. But there is no room in a letter to explain these things. While man keeps to the belief of one God, his reason unites with his creed. He is not shocked with contradictions and horrid stories. His bible is the heavens and the earth. He beholds his Creator in all his works, and every thing he beholds inspires him with reverence and gratitude. From the goodness of God to all, he learns his duty to his fellow-man, and stands self-reproved when he transgresses it. Such a man is no persecutor. But when he multiplies his creed with imaginary things, of which he can have neither evidence nor conception, such as the tale of the garden of Eden, the talking serpent, the fall of man, the dreams of Joseph the carpenter, the pretended resurrection and ascension, of which there is even no historical relation, for no historian of those times mentions such a thing, he gets into the pathless region of confusion, and turns either frantic or hypocrite. He forces his mind, and pretends to believe what he does not believe. This is in general the case with the Methodists. Their religion is all creed and no morals.

"I have now my friend given you a fac-simile of my mind on the subject of religion and creeds, and my wish is, that you may make this letter as publicly known as you find opportunities of doing. Yours in friendship."