The Age of Reason | Page 8

philosophizing." [NOTE: Science and Christian Tradition, p. 18 (Lon. ed.,
1894).] Professor Huxley does not name Paine, evidently because he knows nothing
about him. Yet Paine represents the turning-point of the historical freethinking movement;
he renounced the 'a priori' method, refused to pronounce anything impossible outside
pure mathematics, rested everything on evidence, and really founded the Huxleyan
school. He plagiarized by anticipation many things from the rationalistic leaders of our
time, from Strauss and Baur (being the first to expatiate on "Christian Mythology"), from
Renan (being the first to attempt recovery of the human Jesus), and notably from Huxley,

who has repeated Paine's arguments on the untrustworthiness of the biblical manuscripts
and canon, on the inconsistencies of the narratives of Christ's resurrection, and various
other points. None can be more loyal to the memory of Huxley than the present writer,
and it is even because of my sense of his grand leadership that he is here mentioned as a
typical instance of the extent to which the very elect of free-thought may be
unconsciously victimized by the phantasm with which they are contending. He says that
Butler overthrew freethinkers of the eighteenth century type, but Paine was of the
nineteenth century type; and it was precisely because of his critical method that he
excited more animosity than his deistical predecessors. He compelled the apologists to
defend the biblical narratives in detail, and thus implicitly acknowledge the tribunal of
reason and knowledge to which they were summoned. The ultimate answer by police was
a confession of judgment. A hundred years ago England was suppressing Paine's works,
and many an honest Englishman has gone to prison for printing and circulating his "Age
of Reason." The same views are now freely expressed; they are heard in the seats of
learning, and even in the Church Congress; but the suppression of Paine, begun by
bigotry and ignorance, is continued in the long indifference of the representatives of our
Age of Reason to their pioneer and founder. It is a grievous loss to them and to their
cause. It is impossible to understand the religious history of England, and of America,
without studying the phases of their evolution represented in the writings of Thomas
Paine, in the controversies that grew out of them with such practical accompaniments as
the foundation of the Theophilanthropist Church in Paris and New York, and of the great
rationalist wing of Quakerism in America.
Whatever may be the case with scholars in our time, those of Paine's time took the "Age
of Reason" very seriously indeed. Beginning with the learned Dr. Richard Watson,
Bishop of Llandaff, a large number of learned men replied to Paine's work, and it became
a signal for the commencement of those concessions, on the part of theology, which have
continued to our time; and indeed the so-called "Broad Church" is to some extent an
outcome of "The Age of Reason." It would too much enlarge this Introduction to cite here
the replies made to Paine (thirty-six are catalogued in the British Museum), but it may be
remarked that they were notably free, as a rule, from the personalities that raged in the
pulpits. I must venture to quote one passage from his very learned antagonist, the Rev.
Gilbert Wakefield, B.A., "late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge." Wakefield, who had
resided in London during all the Paine panic, and was well acquainted with the slanders
uttered against the author of "Rights of Man," indirectly brands them in answering Paine's
argument that the original and traditional unbelief of the Jews, among whom the alleged
miracles were wrought, is an important evidence against them. The learned divine writes:
"But the subject before us admits of further illustration from the example of Mr. Paine
himself. In this country, where his opposition to the corruptions of government has raised
him so many adversaries, and such a swarm of unprincipled hirelings have exerted
themselves in blackening his character and in misrepresenting all the transactions and
incidents of his life, will it not be a most difficult, nay an impossible task, for posterity,
after a lapse of 1700 years, if such a wreck of modern literature as that of the ancient,
should intervene, to identify the real circumstances, moral and civil, of the man? And will
a true historian, such as the Evangelists, be credited at that future period against such a
predominant incredulity, without large and mighty accessions of collateral attestation?

And how transcendently extraordinary, I had almost said miraculous, will it be estimated
by candid and reasonable minds, that a writer whose object was a melioration of
condition to the common people, and their deliverance from oppression, poverty,
wretchedness, to the numberless blessings of upright and equal government, should be
reviled, persecuted, and burned in effigy, with every circumstance of insult and