Thomas Paine

The Age of Reason is a deist tract that spends much of its length arguing for the existence of God from the evidence of creation. Paine opens by professing belief in one God and hope for happiness beyond this life, and his objection to the churches is that they stand between people and a creator they could otherwise read directly in nature.

It was received as atheism anyway, and the reception is the historically significant fact. The book appeared while the French Revolution was making any attack on established religion look like an attack on order; it was prosecuted for blasphemous libel in England, its publishers imprisoned; and it cost Paine most of the standing that Common Sense and Rights of Man had won him. Theodore Roosevelt was still calling him a filthy little atheist a century later. He died in New York in 1809 with six people at his funeral, having been refused burial in a Quaker cemetery.

The end of the story is genuinely odd and is usually told wrong. In 1819 William Cobbett, who had once attacked Paine and later became an admirer, dug up the remains and shipped them to England intending a monument and a proper reburial. He never built it. The bones passed with his effects after his death in 1835 and were lost. Various skulls and hands have been claimed since; none is authenticated. There is no grave.

The Age of Reason is remembered as atheism and opens with a creed: I believe in one God, and no more, and I hope for happiness beyond this life. Paine wrote the first part in Paris in 1793 with the Terror closing around him, finishing, by his own account, only hours before his arrest, and composed much of it without a Bible to hand, quoting from memory; the second part, written after ten months in the Luxembourg prison and a near escape from the guillotine, supplied the missing citations at devastating length. The argument is deist, not godless: the created world is the only authentic word of God, science its true theology, and revelation delivered to one person becomes mere hearsay the moment it is repeated to a second. What made the book uniquely dangerous was neither its doctrine, which gentlemen had held privately for a century, nor its originality, but its price and its prose: cheap editions in plain English put the critique of scripture into the hands of artisans, which is why Britain prosecuted its printers for decades.

America never forgave him. The friend of Washington and author of Common Sense returned in 1802 to ostracism, was refused the vote at New Rochelle, and died in 1809 with a handful of mourners; even a decade later, when Cobbett dug up his bones to carry them home in honour, the gesture collapsed into farce. Paine had staked everything on the difference between deism and atheism, and discovered that his countrymen declined to draw it.