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The Age of Reason

Title page from the first English edition of Part I
Author	Thomas Paine
Language	English and French
Publication date	1793 or 1794
Publication place	England and France
Published in English	1794

The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology is a deistic critique of Christianity and the Bible written by the eighteenth-century British radical and American revolutionary Thomas Paine. It was published in three parts in 1794, 1795 and 1807. Although a bestseller in America, where it caused a short-lived deistic revival, it was received with much hostility in Britain because it was published during a radical moment of both the French revolution and British attempts at political reform.

Paine's arguments are not particularly original—most are common deistic fare that had long been available to the educated elite—but in presenting them in an engaging and irreverent style, he made deism appealing to a mass audience. The book was also inexpensive, such that nearly anyone could buy it. Fearing a large readership for potentially revolutionary ideas, the British government prosecuted printers and booksellers who tried to publish and distribute it.

While resulting in only a brief upsurge in deistic thought in America, The Age of Reason had a more lasting effect on nineteenth-century British freethinkers, who were inspired and guided by Paine's ideas and rhetoric.

Historical context

By the time Part I of The Age of Reason was published in 1794, many Britons and French had been disillusioned by the French revolution. The reign of terror had begun, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette had been tried and executed and Britain was at war with France. Those British radicals who still supported the French revolution and its ideals were viewed with deep suspicion by their countrymen. The Age of Reason belongs to this later stage of British radicalism, one that openly embraced republicanism and atheism and is exemplified by such texts as William Godwin's Political Justice (1793). The more moderate voices had disappeared: Richard Price, the Dissenting minister whose sermon on political liberty had prompted Edmund Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790) had died in 1791 and Joseph Priestley had been forced to flee to America after a Church-and-King mob burned down his home and church. William Blake articulated these changes in his poem America: A Prophecy in 1793.

The conservative government, headed by William Pitt, responded to this increasing radicalization by prosecuting several radical booksellers and publishers in the famous 1794 Treason Trials and instituting the Seditious Meetings Act and the Treasonable Practices Act (also known as the "Two Acts"), which prohibited groups of people from gathering, such as the radical London Corresponding Society, and encouraged indictments against radicals for "libelous and seditious" statements. The London Corresponding Society, which had previously been a unifying force for Dissent and radicalism, fractured when Francis Place and other leaders helped Paine publish The Age of Reason; large numbers of the society’s more religious members withdrew in protest.

Publication history

In December of 1792, The Rights of Man, part II was declared seditious in Britain and Paine was forced to flee to France in order to avoid arrest. It was there that he composed Part I of The Age of Reason, motivated by what he saw of the French revolution in 1792 and 1793:

It has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon religion. . . . The circumstance that has now taken place in France of the total abolition of the whole national order of priesthood, and of everything appertaining to compulsive systems of religion, and compulsive articles of faith, has not only precipitated my intention, but rendered a work of this kind exceedingly necessary, lest in the general wreck of superstition, of false systems of government and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true.

It is unclear when exactly Paine drafted Part I; according to Paine scholars Edward Davidson and William Scheick he probably wrote the first draft of Part I in late 1793, but Paine biographer David Hawke argues that he wrote it earlier that year. It is also unclear whether a French edition of Part I was published at that time. François Lanthenas, who translated The Age of Reason into French in 1794, wrote that it was first published in France in 1793 but no book fitting his description has been positively identified. Joel Barlow published the first English edition of The Age of Reason, Part I in London, selling it for a mere three pence.

Meanwhile, Paine, considered too moderate for this stage of the French revolution, was thrown into prison for ten months in France, narrowly avoiding the guillotine. When James Monroe secured his release in 1794, he immediately began work on Part II of The Age of Reason, despite poor health. This was first published in a pirated edition by H.D. Symonds in London in October 1795. In 1796 Daniel Eaton published Parts I and II together for Paine, at the cost of one shilling, six pence. (Eaton was forced to flee to America after being convicted for seditious libel for publishing other radical works.) Paine himself financed the shipping of 15,000 copies of his work to America. Later, Francis Place and Thomas Williams collaborated on an edition which sold about 2000 copies. Williams also produced a separate edition independently, but the British government indicted him and confiscated the pamphlets. Paine fled from France to the United States in the late 1790s where he wrote Part III. He was convinced by Thomas Jefferson not to publish it in 1802 because the backlash would be too great—he had to wait until 1807.

Between 1797 and 1818, no editions of The Age of Reason were sold openly in Britain. It was not until Richard Carlile included it in an edition of Paine's complete works that it became widely available again. Carlile charged one shilling sixpence for the work and the first run of 1,000 copies sold out in one month. He immediately published a second edition of 3,000 copies. Like Williams, he was prosecuted for seditious libel and blasphemous libel. The prosecutions surrounding the printing of The Age of Reason continued for thirty years after its initial release and encompassed numerous publishers as well as over a hundred booksellers.

Arguments

The Age of Reason has most often been analyzed using one of two methods. Following the lead of Henry Hayden Clark, one group of scholars has called Paine an "ideologue" or a "theorist" and discussed his work as a popularization of earlier deist and scientific works. A second group, following Eric Foner, has focused on the uniqueness and power of Paine's rhetoric.

Intellectual debts

The Age of Reason is divided into three sections. In Part I Paine outlines his major arguments and personal creed. In Parts II and III (entitled Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, quoted from the Old and called Prophecies concerning Jesus Christ) he examines specific portions of the Bible in order to prove that it is not a divinely inspired text. Paine presents standard deistic arguments throughout The Age of Reason, demonstrating the problems of Biblical authority and the necessity of proving the existence of God through reason rather than revelation. He also echoes earlier deist writers in his emphasis on the cruel and oppressive history of Christianity and his allusions to Newtonian mechanics. Robert Herrick, who has written extensively on eighteenth-century deism, lists the British deists' shared set of assumptions and arguments: they reject "religious privilege" and "priestcraft" and demand "rational liberty;" they embrace reason and reject revelation, particularly miracles; and they look to "primitive religion" for inspiration. One of the most distinctive features of deistic writing was its insistence that God was a first cause or prime mover rather than an deity who interfered in the lives of individuals.

Although Paine liked to say that he read very little, his writings belie this statement. The broadest influences on The Age of Reason include the works of David Hume, Spinoza and Voltaire. Since Hume had already made many of the same “moral attacks upon Christianity” that Paine popularized in The Age of Reason, scholars have concluded that Paine probably read Hume's works on religion or had at least heard about them from his friends in the Johnson Circle. Paine would have been particularly drawn to Hume’s description of religion as “a positive source of harm to society” that “led men to be factious, ambitious and intolerant." More influential than Hume, however, was Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-politicus (1678). Paine would have been exposed to Spinoza’s ideas through the works of other eighteenth-century deists, most notably Conyers Middleton. Paine would also more than likely have been familiar with Voltaire's mocking wit and of course the works of other French philosophes.

Though these larger philosophical traditions are clear influences on The Age of Reason, it is to the English deists of the early eighteenth century that Paine owes the greatest intellectual debt, for it is the arguments for deism and against Christianity penned by the likes of John Toland, Peter Annet and Matthew Tindal that reappear, albeit less coherently, in The Age of Reason.

Reason

Paine repeatedly emphasizes the importance of relying on reason in The Age of Reason, writing, for example, “it is only by the exercise of reason that man can discover God. Take away that reason, and we would be incapable of understanding anything; and, in this case, it would be just as consistent to read even the book called the Bible to a horse as to a man. How, then, is it that people pretend to reject reason?” He argues that the same rules of logic and standards of evidence that are applied to the analysis of secular texts and institutions should also be applied to the Bible and Christianity.

Paine brings this method to bear on questions of religious revelation, literature and history. He questions the validity of revelation, maintaining that “it is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and consequently they are not obliged to believe it.” Paine also questions the sacredness of the Bible, reading it as one would any other book. For example, in his analysis of the Book of Proverbs he argues that the proverbs are “inferior in keenness to the proverbs of the Spaniards, and not more wise and economical than those of the American Franklin.” For Paine, “the Bible of the Deist" should not be a human invention, such as the Bible, but rather a divine invention—it should be "creation." Paine’s arguments against the Bible often undercut his own earlier works, which rely to a large extent on appeals to Scripture; but as Paine scholar David Wilson writes, "Paine often sacrificed logical coherence to immediate polemical advantage."

Religion and the state

Paine criticizes the tyrannical actions of the Church as he had those of governments in the Rights of Man and Common Sense, claiming that “the Christian theory is little else than the idolatry of the ancient Mythologists, accommodated to the purposes of power and revenue.” This kind of attack distinguishes Paine's work from other deistic works, which were less interested in challenging social and political hierarchies. He argues that the church and the state are a single corrupt institution which does not act in the best interests of the people—they must both be radically altered:

Soon after I had published the pamphlet "Common Sense," in America, I saw the exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be followed by a revolution in the system of religion. The adulterous connection of church and state, wherever it has taken place . . . has so effectually prohibited by pains and penalties every discussion upon established creeds, and upon first principles of religion, that until the system of government should be changed, those subjects could not be brought fairly and openly before the world; but that whenever this should be done, a revolution in the system of religion would follow. Human inventions and priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.

As Jon Mee, a scholar of British radicalism, writes: "Paine believed . . . a revolution in religion was the natural corollary, even prerequisite, of a fully successful political revolution." Paine lays out a vision of, in Davidson and Scheick's words, “an age of intellectual freedom, when reason would triumph over superstition, when the natural liberties of humanity would supplant priestcraft and kingship, which were both secondary effects of politically managed foolish legends and religious superstitions.” It is this vision that scholars have called Paine’s “secular millennialism” and it appears in all of his works—he ends the Rights of Man, for example, with the statement: “From what we now see, nothing of reform in the political world ought to be held improbable. It is an age of revolutions, in which everything may be looked for.” Paine "transformed the millennial Protestant vision of the rule of Christ on earth into a secular image of utopia," emphasizing the possibilities of "progress" and "human perfectibility" that could be achieved by humankind, without God's aid.

Creed

At the beginning of Part I of the Age of Reason, Paine laid out his own personal creed:

I believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.

I believe in the equality of man; and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavouring to make our fellow-creatures happy.

But, lest it should be supposed that I believe many other things in addition to these, I shall, in the progress of this work, declare the things I do not believe, and my reasons for not believing them.

I do not believe in the creed professed by the Jewish Church, by the Roman Church, by the Greek Church, by the Turkish Church, by the Protestant Church, nor by any church that I know of. My own mind is my own church.

All national institutions of churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish, appear to me no other than human inventions, set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolize power and profit.

I do not mean by this declaration to condemn those who believe otherwise; they have the same right to their belief as I have to mine. But it is necessary to the happiness of man that he be mentally faithful to himself. Infidelity does not consist in believing, or in disbelieving; it consists in professing to believe what he does not believe.

As Walter Woll has noted in his book on Paine, there are "remarkable similarities" between Paine's creed and his friend Benjamin Franklin's.

Style

The most distinctive feature of The Age of Reason, like all of Paine's works, is its linguistic style. Historian Eric Foner argues that Paine "forged a new political language" designed to bring politics to the people, using a "clear, simple and straightforward" style. Paine outlined "a new vision—a utopian image of an egalitarian republican society." He originated such phrases as “the rights of man,” “the age of reason,” “the age of revolution,” and “the times that try men’s souls.” In The Age of Reason Foner claims that Paine “gave deism a new, aggressive, explicitly anti-Christian tone;” by appealing to a mass audience through irreverent and plain language, Paine set his work apart from its predecessors. Paine himself wrote to Elihu Palmer, one of his followers in America:

The hinting and intimidating manner of writing that was formerly used on subjects of this kind , produced skepticism, but not conviction. It is necessary to be bold. Some people can be reasoned into sense, and others must be shocked into it. Say a bold thing that will stagger them, and they will begin to think.

Irreverent language

Paine’s Quaker upbringing predisposed him to deistic thinking at the same time that is positioned him firmly within the English dissenting tradition. Paine acknowledged that he was indebted to his Quaker background for his skeptical outlook, but more important for Paine’s writing was the Quakers' esteem for plain speaking, a value expressed both explicitly and implicitly in Paine’s own style. Paine’s innovative, “vulgar” (that is, "low"), irreverent and popular style distinguishes The Age of Reason from its predecessors. As the historian E. P. Thompson has put it, Paine “ridiculed the authority of the Bible with arguments which the collier or country girl could understand.” For example, Paine describes Solomon as a rake, who “was witty, ostentatious, dissolute and at last melancholy;" he “lived fast, and died, tired of the world, at the age of fifty-eight years.” His description of the virgin birth purposefully uses raunchy and demystifying language: it is “an account of a young woman engaged to be married, and while under this engagement she is, to speak plain language, debauched by a ghost.” The Age of Reason, rather than introducing new deistic arguments, took “deism out of the hands of the aristocracy and intellectuals and it to the people.” Although many early English deists had relied on ridicule to make their arguments, theirs was a refined wit rather than an appeal to the low humor Paine employed. It was the early Deists of the middling ranks rather than those of the educated elite who initiated the kind of ridicule Paine would make famous. Earlier in the century Thomas Woolston had been tried for publishing a "profane" deistic work and that trial, like Paine's for writing the Rights of Man and Carlile's for publishing The Age of Reason, turned on the language of the text. When Paine was on trial for the Rights of Man, the Attorney-General instructed the jury to "take into you consideration the phrase and manner as well as the matter" of the text.

As he had done with Common Sense and The Rights of Man, Paine, through his invigorating style, made ideas previously exclusive to the educated elite available to a mass audience. It was this appeal to "the people" that also drew most of his critics' ire. Bishop Richard Watson, in the most influential response to Paine's book, begins his Apology for the Bible: "I shall, designedly, write this and the following letters in a popular manner; hoping that thereby they may stand a chance of being perused by that class of readers, for whom your work seems to be particularly calculated, and who are the most likely to be injured by it." Watson chastised Paine quite specifically for his mocking tone:

I am unwilling to attribute bad designs, deliberate wickedness, to you or to any man; I cannot avoid believing, that you think you have truth on your side, and that you are doing service to mankind in endeavouring to root out what you esteem superstition. What I blame you for is this—that you have attempted to lessen the authority of the Bible by ridicule, more than by reason.

It was Paine's "ridiculing" tone that most angered churchmen. As John Redwood, a scholar of deism, puts it: "the age of reason could perhaps more eloquently and adequately be called the age of ridicule, for its was ridicule, no reason, that endangered the Church."

Religious language

In addition to retelling Biblical stories from a humorous or satirical point of view, Paine also takes advantage of the benefits of several different religious rhetorics in his text. Claiming that religious language is universal, Paine uses it to undermine the hierarchies perpetuated by religion itself. To appeal to his lower-class readers, Paine used a variety of religious rhetorics, most importantly millennial language, albeit stripped of its religiosity.

The sermonic quality of Paine’s writing is one of its most noted elements. Sacvan Bercovitch, a scholar who has studied the sermon, writes that Paine’s writing often resembles that of the jeremiad or "the political sermon." She argues that Paine draws on the Puritan tradition in which “theology was wedded to politics and politics to the progress of the kingdom of God.” One reason Paine may have been drawn to this style is because he may have actually briefly been a Methodist preacher, although this fact cannot be substantiated.

Davidson and Scheick also see a strong influence from Paine's early life in the religious tones of The Age of Reason. They argue that the text resembles early American Quaker conversion narratives with its "introductory statement of purpose, a fervid sense of inward inspiration, a declared expression of conscience, and an evangelical intention to instruct others."

Popularizing techniques

Paine's rhetoric is best known for its broad appeal: "he was able to bridge working-class and middle-class cultures" in all of his works and he wrote "pithy" lines that remained in his readers' memories. He also effectively utilizes repetition and rhetorical questions. Paine also employs "journalistic" language such as "anecdote, irony, parody, satire, feigned confusion, folk matter, concrete vocabulary, and . . . appeals to common sense." He draws his reader into the text by writing conversationally, frequently referring to "I" or "we." His "we's", often followed by present tense verbs, convey an "illusion that he and the readers share the activity of constructing an argument." In so doing, he emphasizes the role of the reader, leaving images and arguments half-formed and encouraging his readers to independently complete them.

Reception and legacy

The Age of Reason was, in general, hostilely received, although the level of that hostility varied by locality. Four major factors for this hostility have been cited: Paine denied that the Bible was a sacred, inspired text; he argued that Christianity was a human institution, invented like other religions; his ability to command a large readership frightened those in power; and his irreverent and satirical style of writing about Christianity and the Bible offended many believers.

Britain

Paine's Age of Reason sparked enough anger to initiate not only a series of government prosecutions but also a pamphlet war in Britain. Around 50 unfavorable replies appeared between 1795 and 1799 alone. Many of these responded specifically to Paine's attack on the Bible in Part II; when Thomas Williams was prosecuted for printing Part II, it became clear its circulation had far exceded that of Part I. Although critics responded to Paine's analysis of the Bible in Part II, they did not usually address his particular arguments. Instead, they contended for a literal reading of the Bible, citing its long history in favor of its authority; they also made ad hominem attacks against Paine, describing him "as an enemy of proper thought and of the morality of decent, enlightened people."

Despite the outpouring of antagonistic replies to The Age of Reason, Thompson and Mee argue that Constantin Volney's deistic The Ruins—excerpted in radical papers such as Thomas Spence's Pig’s Meat and Daniel Eaton’s Politics for the People—was actually more influential than The Age of Reason. David Bindman agrees, writing that The Ruins "achieved a popularity in England comparable to Rights of Man itself."

It was not until Richard Carlile's trial for publishing The Age of Reason in 1818 that Paine's text became "the anti-Bible of all lower-class nineteenth-century infidel agitators." Although the book was selling well before the trial, once Carlile had been arrested and charged, 4000 copies were sold in just a few months. At the trial itself, which created a media frenzy, Carlile read the entirety of The Age of Reason into the court record, ensuring it an even wider publication. Between 1818 and 1822, Carlile claimed to have "sent into circulation near 20,000 copies of the Age of Reason." Just as in the 1790s, it was the language that most angered the authorities in 1818. As Joss Marsh in her study of blasphemy in the nineteenth century points out, "at these trials plain English was reconfigured as itself 'abusive' and 'outrageous.' The Age of Reason struggle almost tolled the hour when the words 'plain,' 'coarse,' 'common,' and 'vulgar' took on a pejorative meaning." Carlile was convicted of blasphemy and sentenced to one year in prison, but spent six years in jail because he refused any "legal conditions" on his release.

Paine's new rhetoric came to dominate popular nineteenth-century journalism, influencing Thomas Wooler, Richard Carlile, Henry Hetherington, William Lovett, George Holyoake, and Charles Bradlaugh. A century after the publication of the The Age of Reason, Paine's rhetoric was still being used: George Foote's "Bible Handbook (1888) . . . systematically manhandles chapters and verses to bring out 'Contradictions,' 'Absurdities,' 'Atrocities,' and 'Obscenities,' exactly in the manner of Paine’s Age of Reason." The periodical The Freethinker (founded in 1881) argued, like Paine, that the "absurdities of faith" could be "slain with laughter." In Britain, it was this freethinking tradition that was most responsible for maintaining Paine's legacy.

France

Despite having been its intended audience, The Age of Reason made very little, if any, impact on revolutionary France where such arguments and rhetoric were already common. While in France, Paine formed the Church of Theophilanthropy with five other families who adopted as their central dogma the idea that man should worship God's wisdom and benevolence, and imitate those divine attributes as much as possible. The church had no priest or minister, and the traditional Biblical sermon was replaced by scientific lectures or homilies on the teachings of Confucius and the Greek philosophers. Samuel Adams wrote that Paine aimed "to renovate the age by inculcating in the minds of youth the fear and love of the Deity and universal philanthropy."

United States

In the United States, The Age of Reason initially caused a deistic "revival," but was then viciously attacked and soon forgotten. Paine became reviled—he could still, incorrectly, be called a "filthy little atheist" by Theodore Roosevelt at the turn of the twentieth century.

America was ripe for Paine’s arguments after the First Great Awakening had in demolishing the "Calvinist hegemony, created a climate of theological and speculative ambivalence" that welcomed deistic conclusions. With his Oracles of Reason, Ethan Allen published the first American defense of deism in 1784. Deism was primarily a philosophy of the educated elite, though, with men such as Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson espousing its tenets while at the same time arguing that religion served the useful purpose of "social control." It was not until the publication of Paine’s more entertaining and popular work that deism reached beyond the educated classes in America. The public was receptive in part due to their positive impression of the secular ideals of the French revolution. The Age of Reason went through seventeen editions and sold thousands of copies. Elihu Palmer, "a blind renegade minister" and Paine's most loyal follower in America, promoted deism throughout the country. Palmer published what became "the bible of American deism," The Principles of Nature, established deistic societies from Maine to Georgia, built Temples of Reason throughout the nation, and founded two deistic newspapers for which Paine eventually wrote seventeen essays. Foner writes that "The Age of Reason became the most popular deist work ever written. . . . Before Paine it had been possible to be both a Christian and a deist; now such a religious outlook became virtually untenable." Paine presented deism to the masses, and it was the elite's fear of a deistic populace that largely drove the backlash that soon followed.

An almost immediate backlash, in the form of the Second Great Awakening, followed this deistic upsurge. George Spater explains that "the revulsion felt for Paine’s Age of Reason and for other anti-religious thought was so great that a major counter-revolution had been set underway in America before the end of the eighteenth century.” By 1796 every student at Harvard was given a copy of Bishop Watson’s rebuttal of The Age of Reason. Paine could not publish An Examination of the Passages in the New Testament, Quoted from the Old and Called Prophecies Concerning Jesus Christ (part III of The Age of Reason) in America until 1807 because of public outrage. Hailed only a few years earlier as a hero of the American revolution, Paine was now lambasted in the press and called "the scavenger of faction, a "lilly-livered sinical rogue," a "loathsome reptile," a "demi-human archbeast," "an object of disgust, of abhorrence, of absolute loathing to every decent man except the President of the United States ." In October of 1805 John Adams wrote to Benjamin Waterhouse in disgust:

I am willing you should call this the Age of Frivolity as you do, and would not object if you had named it the Age of Folly, Vice, Frenzy, Brutality, Daemons, Buonaparte {sic], Tom Paine, or the Age of the Burning Brand from Bottomless Pit, or anything but the Age of Reason. I know not whether any man in the world has had more influence on its inhabitants or affairs for the last thirty years than Tom Paine. There can be no severer satyr on the age. For such a mongrel between pig and puppy, begotten by a wild boar on a bitch wolf, never before in any age of the word was suffered by the poltroonery of mankind, to run through such a career of mischief. Call it then the Age of Paine.

Adams viewed Paine's Age of Reason not as the embodiment of the Enlightenment but as a "betrayal" of it.

Paine never wavered in his beliefs; when he was dying, a woman came to visit him, claiming that God told her to try and save his soul. Paine dismissed her in the same tones that he had used in The Age of Reason: "pooh, pooh, it is not true. You were not sent with any such impertinent message. . . . Pshaw, He would not send such a foolish ugly old woman as you about with His message."

The Age of Reason was largely ignored after 1820, except by radical groups in Britain. Not until the publication of Charles Darwin's The Origin of Species in 1859, with its concomitant large-scale abandonment of a literal reading of the Bible, did many of Paine's ideas take hold.

See also

• List of banned books
• The American Crisis

Notes

1. Butler, Marilyn. Romantics, Rebels and Reactionaries: English Literature and its Background 1760-1830. Oxford: Oxford University Press (1981), 49.
2. Bindman, 118.
3. Thompson, E.P. The Making of the English Working Class. New York: Vintage Books (1966), 148.
4. Paine, 49-50.
5. ^ Davidson and Scheick, 103-6.
6. ^ Hawke, 292-94.
7. See Gimbel for a discussion of one possible copy of the 1793 French text.
8. Kuklick, xix-xxi.
9. Smith, 108.
10. ^ Claeys, 187-88.
11. Bronowski, Julius. William Blake and the Age of Revolution. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul (1965), 81; Claeys, 190; Wiener, 108-9.
12. Wilson, x.
13. Herrick, 26-39.
14. Kuklick, xiii.
15. Robbins, 135-42.
16. Hole, Robert. Pulpits, politics and public order in England, 1760-1832. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (1989), 69.
17. Robbins, 140-41; Davidson and Schieck, 58.
18. In Annet, Paine is said to have a direct “forerunner” in deistic argumentation, advocacy of “freedom of expression and religious inquiry” and emphasis on “social reforms.” Annet even concerned himself with the price of one of his controversial religious pamphlets. Such a concern is worthy of Paine. (Herrick 130-4)
19. Paine, 70.
20. Paine, 52.
21. Paine, 60-61.
22. Paine, 185.
23. Wilson, xv; see also Davidson and Scheick, 49 and Fruchtman, 3-4; 28-9.
24. Paine, 53.
25. Paine, 51.
26. Mee, Jon. Dangerous Enthusiasms: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s. Oxford: Clarendon Press (1992), 162.
27. ^ Davidson and Scheick, 18-19.
28. Qtd. in Foner, 216; Fruchtman, 157-8; Harrison, 80.
29. Foner, 91; see also Fruchtman, 157-8.
30. Paine, 50.
31. Woll, 138, note 1. Franklin's creed: "I believe in one God, the creator of the universe. That he governs it by his Providence. That he ought to be worshipped. That the most acceptable service we render to him is doing good to his other children. That the soul of man is immortal, and will be treated with justice in another life respecting its conduct in this."
32. ^ Foner, xvi.
33. Foner, xv.
34. ^ Foner, 247.
35. Foner, "Introduction," The Age of Reason, 35.
36. Qtd. in Clark, 317.
37. Thompson, 98.
38. Paine, 136.
39. Paine, 156.
40. Foot, Michael and Isaac Kramnick, eds. The Thomas Paine Reader. New York: Penguin Books (1987), 399.
41. Herrick, 52; 61-65; 80-1.
42. Herrick, 92ff.
43. Foner, 230.
44. Watson, Richard. An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters, addressed to Thomas Paine. Philadelphia: James Carey (1979), 3.
45. Watson, 34.
46. Redwood, John. Reason, Ridicule and Religion: The Age of Enlightenment in England, 1660- 1750. London: Thames and Hudson (1976), 196.
47. Smith, 183.
48. Fruchtman, 4; 157.
49. Bercovitch, Sacvan. The American Jeremiad. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press (1978), xiv; see also Fruchtman, xi.
50. Davidson and Scheick, 28.
51. Davidson and Scheick, 99.
52. Kuklick, xi-xii.
53. Davidson and Scheick, 100-101.
54. Smith, 53-4.
55. Smith, 56.
56. Claeys, 187-8; Davidson and Scheick, 88.
57. Davidson and Scheick, 89.
58. Mee, 138
59. Bindman, 129.
60. Marsh, 61.
61. Marsh, 67.
62. Qtd. in Marsh, 71.
63. Marsh, 74.
64. Wiener, 108-9.
65. Thompson, 94.
66. Marsh, 172.
67. Qtd. in Marsh, 137.
68. Davidson and Scheick 88; Claeys 177.
69. Woll 149.
70. Qtd. in Harrison, "Thomas Paine and Millenarian Radicalism," 80.
71. Foner, 270.
72. Walters, 31.
73. Walters, 8.
74. Kuklick, xiii; xxii.
75. Walters, 27; 35-6.
76. Foner, 256.
77. Walters, 192.
78. Walters, 10.
79. Foner, 256.
80. Spater, George. "Introduction." Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. Ed. Ian Dyck. New York: St. Martin’s Press (1988), 10.
81. Qtd. in Foner, "Introduction," The Age of Reason, 40.
82. Qtd. in Hawke, 7.
83. Gaustad, Edwin S. Neither King nor Prelate: Religion and the New Nation, 1776-1826. Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. (1993), 89.
84. Qtd. in Hawke, 390.
85. Woll, 197.

Bibliography

• Bindman, David. "'My own mind is my own church': Blake, Paine and the French Revolution." Reflections of Revolution: Images of Romanticism. Ed. Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest. London: Routledge, 1993. ISBN 0415077419.
• Claeys, Gregory. Thomas Paine: Social and political thought. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. ISBN 0044450893.
• Clark, Harry Hayden. "Thomas Paine’s Theories of Rhetoric." Transactions of the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters 28 (1933): 307-39.
• Davidson, Edward H. and William J. Scheick. Paine, Scripture, and Authority: The Age of Reason as Religious and Political Idea. Bethlehem: Lehigh University Press, 1994. ISBN 0934223297.
• Dyck, Ian, ed. Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. ISBN 0312013000.
• Foner, Eric. Tom Paine and Revolutionary America. London: Oxford University Press, 1976. ISBN 0195021827.
• Fruchtman, Jr., Jack. Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993. ISBN 0801845718.
• Gimbel, Richard. "The First Appearance of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason." Yale University Library Gazette 31 (1957): 87-89.
• Harrison, J.F.C. "Thomas Paine and Millenarian Radicalism." Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. Ed. Ian Dyck. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988. ISBN 0312013000.
• Hawke, David Freeman. Paine. New York: Harper & Row, 1974. ISBN 0060117842.
• Herrick, James A. The Radical Rhetoric of the English Deists: The Discourse of Skepticism, 1680-1750. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1997. ISBN 1570031665.
• Marsh, Joss. Word Crimes: Blasphemy, Culture, and Literature in Nineteenth-Century England. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998. ISBN 0226506916.
• Paine, Thomas. The Age of Reason. Ed. Philip S. Foner. New York: Citadel Press, 1974. ISBN 0806505494.
• Robbins, Caroline. “The Lifelong Education of Thomas Paine (1737-1809): Some Reflections upon His Acquaintance among Books.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society 127.3 (1983): 135-42.
• Royle, Edward, ed. The Infidel Tradition from Paine to Bradlaugh. London: Macmillan Press Ltd., 1976. ISBN 0333174348.
• Smith, Olivia. The Politics of Language, 1791-1819. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984. ISBN 0198128177.
• Walters, Kerry S. Rational Infidels: The American Deists. Durango, CO: Longwood Academic, 1992. ISBN 089341641X.
• Wiener, Joel H. "Collaborators of a Sort: Thomas Paine and Richard Carlile." Citizen of the World: Essays on Thomas Paine. Ed. Ian Dyck. New York: St. Martin's Press, 1988. ISBN 0312013000.
• Wilson, David A. Paine and Cobbett: The Translatlantic Connection. Kingston and Montreal: McGill–Queen's University Press, 1988. ISBN 0773510133.
• Woll, Walter. Thomas Paine: Motives for Rebellion. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 1992. ISBN 3631448007.

External links

• Paine's The Age of Reason, Part I at thomaspaine.org
• Paine's The Age of Reason, Parts I and II at ushistory.org
• Writings of Thomas Paine — Volume 4 (1794-1796): the Age of Reason by Paine at Project Gutenberg
• Paine's The Age of Reason, Parts I and II from The University of Adelaide Library Electronic Texts Collection.

• 1794 books
• Deist texts
• Books critical of Christianity
• Criticism of religion
• Anti-Christianity