The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume II Part 15

The copy in my possession is inscribed with pen: "This was J. Joyce's copy, and noticed by him as Paine's work." Mr.

Joyce was a Unitarian minister. It is probable that the suppression of Paine's name was in deference to his outlawry, and to the dread, by a sect whose legal position was precarious, of any suspicion of connection with "Painite" principles.

That his Religion of Humanity took the deistical form was an evolutionary necessity. English deism was not a religion, but at first a philosophy, and afterwards a scientific generalization. Its founder, as a philosophy, Herbert of Cherbury, had created the matrix in which was formed the Quaker religion of the "inner light," by which Paine's childhood was nurtured; its founder as a scientific theory of creation, Sir Isaac Newton, had determined the matrix in which all unorthodox systems should originate. The real issue was between a sanctified ancient science and a modern science. The utilitarian English race, always the stronghold of science, had established the freedom of the new deism, which thus became the mould into which all unorthodoxies ran.

From the time of Newton, English and American thought and belief have steadily become Unitarian. The dualism of Jesus, the thousand years of faith which gave every soul its post in a great war between G.o.d and Satan, without which there would have been no church, has steadily receded before a monotheism which, under whatever verbal disguises, makes the deity author of all evil. English Deism prevailed only to be reconquered into alliance with a tribal G.o.d of antiquity, developed into the tutelar deity of Christendom. And this evolution involved the transformation of Jesus into Jehovah, deity of a "chosen" or "elect"

people. It was impossible for an apostle of the international republic, of the human brotherhood, whose Father was degraded by any notion of favoritism to a race, or to a "first-born son," to accept a name in which foreign religions had been harried, and Christendom established on a throne of thinkers' skulls. The philosophical and scientific deism of Herbert and Newton had grown cold in Paine's time, but it was detached from all the internecine figure-heads called G.o.ds; it appealed to the reason of all mankind; and in that manger, amid the beasts, royal and revolutionary, was cradled anew the divine humanity.

Paine wrote "Deism" on his banner in a militant rather than an affirmative way. He was aiming to rescue the divine Idea from traditional degradations in order that he might with it confront a revolutionary Atheism defying the celestial monarchy. In a later work, speaking of a theological book, "An Antidote to Deism," he remarks: "An antidote to Deism must be Atheism." So far as it is theological, the "Age of Reason" was meant to combat Infidelity. It raised before the French the pure deity of Herbert, of Newton, and other English deists whose works were unknown in France. But when we scrutinize Paine's positive Theism we find a distinctive nucleus forming within the nebulous ma.s.s of deistical speculations. Paine recognizes a deity only in the astronomic laws and intelligible order of the universe, and in the corresponding reason and moral nature of man. Like Kant, he was filled with awe by the starry heavens and man's sense of right*. The first part of the "Age of Reason" is chiefly astronomical; with those celestial wonders he contrasts such stories as that of Samson and the foxes. "When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible Whole, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the word of G.o.d." Then turning to the Atheist he says: "We did not make ourselves; we did not make the principles of science, which we discover and apply but cannot alter." The only revelation of G.o.d in which he believes is "the universal display of himself in the works of creation, and that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition to do good ones." "The only idea we can have of serving G.o.d, is that of contributing to the happiness of the living creation that G.o.d has made."

* Astronomy, as we know, he had studied profoundly. In early life he had studied astronomic globes, purchased at the cost of many a dinner, and the orrery(sp), and attended lectures at the Royal Society. In the "Age of Reason" he writes, twenty-one years before Herschel's famous paper on the Nebulae: "The probability is that each of those fixed stars is also a sun, round which another system of worlds or planets, though too remote for as to discover, performs its revolutions."

It thus appears that in Paine's Theism the deity is made manifest, not by omnipotence, a word I do not remember in his theories, but in this correspondence of universal order and bounty with rcason and conscience, and the humane heart In later works this speculative side of his Theism presented a remarkable Zoroastrian variation. When pressed with Bishop Butler's terrible argument against previous Deism,--that the G.o.d of the Bible is no more cruel than the G.o.d of Nature,--Paine declared his preference for the Persian religion, which exonerated the deity from responsibility for natural evils, above the Hebrew which attributed such things to G.o.d. He was willing to sacrifice G.o.d's omnipotence to his humanity. He repudiates every notion of a devil, but was evidently unwilling to ascribe the unconquered realms of chaos to the divine Being in whom he believed.

Thus, while theology was lowering Jesus to a mere King, glorying in baubles of crown and throne, pleased with adulation, and developing him into an authorizor of all the ills and agonies of the world, so depriving him of his humanity, Paine was recovering from the universe something like the religion of Jesus himself. "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right" In affirming the Religion of Humanity, Paine did not mean what Comte meant, a personification of the continuous life of our race*; nor did he merely mean benevolence towards all living creatures.

* Paine's friend and fellow-prisoner, Anacharsis Clootz, was the first to describe Humanity as "L'etre Supreme."

He affirmed a Religion based on the authentic divinity of that which is supreme in human nature and distinctive of it The sense of right, justice, love, mercy, is G.o.d himself in man; this spirit judges all things,--all alleged revelations, all G.o.ds. In affirming a deity too good, loving, just, to do what is ascribed to Jahve, Paine was animated by the same spirit that led the early believer to turn from heartless elemental G.o.ds to one born of woman, bearing in his breast a human heart. Pauline theology took away this human divinity, and effected a restoration, by making the Son of Man Jehovah, and commanding the heart back from its seat of judgment, where Jesus had set it. "Shall the clay say to the potter, why hast thou formed me thus?" "Yes," answered Paine, "if the thing felt itself hurt, and could speak." He knew as did Emerson, whom he often antic.i.p.ates, that "no G.o.d dare wrong a worm."

The force of the "Age of Reason" is not in its theology, though this ethical variation of Deism in the direction of humanity is of exceeding interest to students who would trace the evolution of avatars and incarnations. Paine's theology was but gradually developed, and in this work is visible only as a tide beginning to rise under the fiery orb of his religious pa.s.sion. For abstract theology he cares little. "If the belief of errors not morally bad did no mischief, it would make no part of the moral duty of man to oppose and remove them." He evinces regret that the New Testament, containing so many elevated moral precepts, should, by leaning on supposed prophecies in the Old Testament, have been burdened with its barbarities. "It must follow the fate of its foundation." This fatal connection, he knows, is not the work of Jesus; he ascribes it to the church which evoked from the Old Testament a crushing system of priestly and imperial power reversing the benign principles of Jesus. It is this oppression, the throne of all oppressions, that he a.s.sails. His affirmations of the human deity are thus mainly expressed in his vehement denials.

This long chapter must now draw to a close. It would need a volume to follow thoroughly the argument of this epoch-making book, to which I have here written only an introduction, calling attention to its evolutionary factors, historical and spiritual. Such then was the new Pilgrim's Progress. As in that earlier prison, at Bedford, there shone in Paine's cell in the Luxembourg a great and imperishable vision, which mult.i.tudes are still following. The book is accessible in many editions.

The Christian teacher of to-day may well ponder this fact. The atheists and secularists of our time are printing, reading, revering a work that opposes their opinions. For above its arguments and criticisms they see the faithful heart contending with a mighty Apollyon, girt with all the forces of revolutionary and Royal Terrorism. Just this one Englishman, born again in America, confronting George III. and Robespierre on earth and tearing the like of them from the throne of the universe! Were it only for the grandeur of this spectacle in the past Paine would maintain his hold on thoughtful minds.

But in America the hold is deeper than that. In this self-forgetting insurrection of the human heart against deified Inhumanity there is an expression of the inarticulate wrath of humanity against continuance of the same wrong. In the circulation throughout the earth of the Bible as the Word of G.o.d, even after its thousand serious errors of translation are turned, by exposure, into falsehoods; in the deliverance to savages of a scriptural sanction of their tomahawks and poisoned arrows; in the diffusion among cruel tribes of a religion based on human sacrifice, after intelligence has abandoned it; in the preservation of costly services to a deity who "needs nothing at men's hands," beside hovels of the poor who need much; in an exemption of sectarian property from taxation which taxes every man to support the sects, and continues the alliance of church and state; in these things, and others--the list is long--there is still visible, however refined, the sting and claw of the Apollyon against whom Paine hurled his far-reaching dart. The "Age of Reason" was at first published in America by a religious house, and as a religious book. It was circulated in Virginia by Washington's old friend, Parson Weems. It is still circulated, though by supposed unbelievers, as a religious book, and such it is.

Its religion is expressed largely in those same denunciations which theologians resent. I have explained them; polite agnostics apologize for them, or cast Paine over as a Jonah of the rationalistic ship. But to make one expression more gentle would mar the work. As it stands, with all its violences and faults, it represents, as no elaborate or polite treatise could, the agony and b.l.o.o.d.y sweat of a heart breaking in the presence of crucified Humanity. What dear heads, what n.o.ble hearts had that man seen laid low; what shrieks had he heard in the desolate homes of the Condorcets, the Brissots; what Canaanite and Midianite ma.s.sacres had he seen before the altar of Brotherhood, erected by himself! And all because every human being had been taught from his cradle that there is something more sacred than humanity, and to which man should be sacrificed. Of all those mas-sacred thinkers not one voice remains: they have gone silent: over their reeking guillotine sits the gloating Apollyon of Inhumanity. But here is one man, a prisoner, preparing for his long silence. He alone can speak for those slain between the throne and the altar. In these outbursts of laughter and tears, these outcries that think not of literary style, these appeals from surrounding chaos to the starry realm of order, from the tribune of vengeance to the sun shining for all, this pa.s.sionate horror of cruelty in the powerful which will brave a heartless heaven or h.e.l.l with its immortal indignation,--in all these the unfettered mind may hear the wail of enthralled Europe, sinking back choked with its blood, under the chain it tried to break. So long as a link remains of the same chain, binding reason or heart, Paine's "Age of Reason" will live. It is not a mere book--it is a man's heart.

CHAPTER XII. FRIENDSHIPS

Baron Pichon, who had been a sinuous Secretary of Legation in America under Genet and Fauchet, and attached to the Foreign Office in France under the Directory, told George Ticknor, in 1837, that "Tom Paine, who lived in Monroe's house at Paris, had a great deal too much influence over Monroe."*

* "Life of George Ticknor," ii., p. 113. 223

The Baron, apart from his prejudice against republicanism (Talleyrand was his master), knew more about American than French politics at the time of Monroe's mission in France. The agitation caused in France by Jay's negotiations in England, and rumors set afloat by their secrecy,--such secrecy being itself felt as a violation of good faith--rendered Monroe's position unhappy and difficult. After Paine's release from prison, his generous devotion to France, undiminished by his wrongs, added to the painful illness that reproached the Convention's negligence, excited a chivalrous enthusiasm for him. The tender care of Mr. and Mrs. Monroe for him, the fact that this faithful friend of France was in their house, were circ.u.mstances of international importance. Of Paine's fidelity to republican principles, and his indignation at their probable betrayal in England, there could be no doubt in any mind. He was consulted by the French Executive, and was virtually the most important _attache_ of the United States Legation.

The "intrigue" of which Thibaudeau had spoken, in Convention, as having driven Paine from that body, was not given to the public, but it was well understood to involve the American President. If Paine's suffering represented in London Washington's deference to England, all the more did he stand to France as a representative of those who in America were battling for the Alliance. He was therefore a tower of strength to Monroe. It will be seen by the subjoined letter that while he was Monroe's guest it was to him rather than the Minister that the Foreign Office applied for an introduction of a new Consul to Samuel Adams, Governor of Ma.s.sachusetts--a Consul with whom Paine was not personally acquainted. The general feeling and situation in France at the date of this letter (March 6th), and the anger at Jay's secret negotiations in England, are reflected in it:

"My Dear Friend,--Mr. Mozard, who is appointed Consul, will present you this letter. He is spoken of here as a good sort of man, and I can have no doubt that you will find him the same at Boston. When I came from America it was my intention to return the next year, and I have intended the same every year since. The case I believe is, that as I am embarked in the revolution, I do not like to leave it till it is finished, notwithstanding the dangers I have run. I am now almost the only survivor of those who began this revolution, and I know not how it is that I have escaped. I know however that I owe nothing to the government of America. The executive department has never directed either the former or the present Minister to enquire whether I was dead or alive, in prison or in liberty, what the cause of the imprisonment was, and whether there was any service or a.s.sistance it could render. Mr. Monroe acted voluntarily in the case, and reclaimed me as an American citizen; for the pretence for my imprisonment was that I was a foreigner, born in England.

"The internal scene here from the 31 of May 1793 to the fall of Robespierre has been terrible. I was shut up in the prison of the Luxembourg eleven months, and I find by the papers of Robespierre that have been published by the Convention since his death, that I was designed for a worse fate. The following memorandum is in his own handwriting; 'Demander que Thomas Paine soit decrete d'accusation pour les interets de l'Amerique autant que de la France.'

"You will see by the public papers that the successes of the French arms have been and continue to be astonishing, more especially since the fall of Robespierre, and the suppression of the system of Terror. They have fairly beaten all the armies of Austria, Prussia, England, Spain, Sardignia, and Holland. Holland is entirely conquered, and there is now a revolution in that country.

"I know not how matters are going on your side the water, but I think everything is not as it ought to be. The appointment of G. Morris to be Minister here was the most unfortunate and the most injudicious appointment that could be made. I wrote this opinion to Mr. Jefferson at the time, and I said the same to Morris. Had he not been removed at the time he was I think the two countries would have been involved in a quarrel, for it is a fact, that he would either have been ordered away or put in arrestation; for he gave every reason to suspect that he was secretly a British Emissary.

"What Mr. Jay is about in England I know not; but is it possible that any man who has contributed to the Independence of America, and to free her from the tyranny of the British Government, can read without shame and indignation the note of Jay to Grenville? That the _United States has no other resource than in the justice and magnanimity of his Majesty_, is a satire upon the Declaration of Independence, and exhibits [such] a spirit of meanness on the part of America, that, were it true, I should be ashamed of her. Such a declaration may suit the spaniel character of Aristocracy, but it cannot agree with manly character of a Republican.

"Mr. Mozard is this moment come for this letter, and he sets off directly.--G.o.d bless you, remember me among the circle of our friends, and tell them how much I wish to be once more among them.

"Thomas Paine."*

* Mr. Spofford, Librarian of Congress, has kindly copied this letter for me from the original, among the papers of George Bancroft.

There are indications of physical feebleness as well as haste in this letter. The spring and summer brought some vigor, but, as we have seen by Monroe's letter to Judge Jones, he sank again and in the autumn seemed nearing his end. Once more the announcement of his death appeared in England, this time bringing joy to the orthodox. From the same quarter, probably, whence issued, in 1793, "Intercepted Correspondence from Satan to Citizen Paine," came now ( 1795 ) a folio sheet: "Glorious News for Old England. The British Lyon rous'd; or John Bull for ever.

"The Fox has lost his Tail The a.s.s has done his Braying, The Devil has got Tom Paine."

Good-hearted as Paine was, it must be admitted that he was cruelly persistent in disappointing these British obituaries. Despite anguish, fever, and abscess--this for more than a year eating into his side,--he did not gratify those prayerful expectations by becoming a monument of divine retribution. Nay, amid all these sufferings he had managed to finish Part Second of the "Age of Reason," write the "Dissertation on Government," and give the Address before the Convention, Nevertheless when, in November, he was near death's door, there came from England tidings grievous enough to crush a less powerful const.i.tution. It was reported that many of his staunchest old friends had turned against him on account of his heretical book. This report seemed to find confirmation in the successive volumes of Gilbert Wakefield in reply to the two Parts of Paine's book. Wakefield held Unitarian opinions, and did not defend the real fortress besieged by Paine. He was enraged that Paine should deal with the authority of the Bible, and the orthodox dogmas, as if they were Christianity, ignoring unorthodox versions altogether. This, however, hardly explains the extreme and coa.r.s.e vituperation of these replies, which shocked Wakefield's friends.*

* "The office of 'castigation' was unworthy of our friend's talents, and detrimental to his purpose of persuading others. Such a contemptuous treatment, even of an unfair disputant, was also too well calculated to depredate in the public estimation that benevolence of character by which Mr.

Wakefield was so justly distinguished."--"Life of Gilbert Wakefield," 1804, ii., p. 33.

Although in his thirty-eighth year at this time, Wakefield was not old enough to escape the _sequelae_ of his former clericalism. He had been a Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge, afterwards had a congregation, and had continued his connection with the English Church after he was led, by textual criticism, to adopt Unitarian opinions. He had great reputation as a linguist, and wrote Scriptural expositions and retranslations. But few read his books, and he became a tutor in a dissenting college at Hackney, mainly under influence of the Unitarian leaders, Price and Priestley. Wakefield would not condescend to any connection with a dissenting society, and his career at Hackney was marked by arrogant airs towards Unitarians, on account of a university training, then not open to dissenters. He attacked Price and Priestley, his superiors in every respect, apart from their venerable position and services, in a contemptuous way; and, in fact, might be brevetted a prig, with a fondness for coa.r.s.e phrases, sometimes printed with blanks.

He flew at Paine as if he had been waiting for him; his replies, not affecting any vital issue, were displays of linguistic and textual learning, set forth on the background of Paine's page, which he blackened. He exhausts his large vocabulary of vilification on a book whose substantial affirmations he concedes; and it is done in the mean way of appropriating the credit of Paine's arguments.

Gilbert Wakefield was indebted to the excitement raised by Paine for the first notice taken by the general public of anything he ever wrote. Paine, however, seems to have been acquainted with a sort of autobiography which he had published in 1792. In this book Wakefield admitted with shame that he had subscribed the Church formulas when he did not believe them, while indulging in flings at Price, Priestley, and others, who had suffered for their principles. At the same time there were some things in Wakefield's autobiography which could not fail to attract Paine: it severely attacked slavery, and also the whole course of Pitt towards France. This was done with talent and courage. It was consequently a shock when Gilbert Wakefield's outrageous abuse of himself came to the invalid in his sick-room. It appeared to be an indication of the extent to which he was abandoned by the Englishmen who had sympathized with his political principles, and to a large extent with his religious views. This acrimonious repudiation added groans to Paine's sick and sinking heart, some of which were returned upon his Socinian a.s.sailant, and in kind. This private letter my reader must see, though it was meant for no eye but that of Gilbert Wakefield. It is dated at Paris, November 19, 1795.

"Dear Sir,--When you prudently chose, like a starved apothecary, to offer your eighteenpenny antidote to those who had taken my two-and-sixpenny Bible-purge,* you forgot that although my dose was rather of the roughest, it might not be the less wholesome for possessing that drastick quality; and if I am to judge of its salutary effects on your infuriate polemic stomach, by the nasty things it has made you bring away, I think you should be the last man alive to take your own panacea. As to the collection of words of which you boast the possession, n.o.body, I believe, will dispute their amount, but every one who reads your answer to my 'Age of Reason' will wish there were not so many scurrilous ones among them; for though they may be very usefull in emptying your gallbladder they are too apt to move the bile of other people.

* These were the actual prices of the books.

"Those of Greek and Latin are rather foolishly thrown away, I think, on a man like me, who, you are pleased to say, is 'the greatest ignoramus in nature': yet I must take the liberty to tell you, that wisdom does not consist in the mere knowledge of language, but of things.

"You recommend me to _know myself_--a thing very easy to advise, but very difficult to practice, as I learn from your own book; for you take yourself to be a meek disciple of Christ, and yet give way to pa.s.sion and pride in every page of its composition.

"You have raised an ant-hill about the roots of my st.u.r.dy oak, and it may amuse idlers to see your work; but neither its body nor its branches are injured by you; and I hope the shade of my Civic Crown may be able to preserve your little contrivance, at least for the season.

"When you have done as much service to the world by your writings, and suffered as much for them, as I have done, you will be better ent.i.tled to dictate: but although I know you to be a keener politician than Paul, I can a.s.sure you, from my experience of mankind, that you do not much commend the Christian doctrines to them by announcing that it requires the labour of a learned life to make them understood.

"May I be permitted, after all, to suggest that your truly vigorous talents would be best employed in teaching men to preserve their liberties exclusively,--leaving to that G.o.d who made their immortal souls the care of their eternal welfare.

"I am, dear Sir,

"Your true well-wisher,

"Tho. Paine.

"To Gilbert Wakefield, A. B."

After a first perusal of this letter has made its unpleasant impression, the reader will do well to read it again. Paine has repaired to his earliest Norfolk for language appropriate to the coa.r.s.er tongue of his Nottinghamshire a.s.sailant; but it should be said that the offensive paragraph, the first, is a travesty of one written by Wakefield. In his autobiography, after groaning over his books that found no buyers, a veritable "starved apothecary," Wakefield describes the uneasiness caused by his pamphlet on "Religious Worship" as proof that the disease was yielding to his "potion." He says that "as a physician of spiritual maladies" he had seconded "the favourable operation of the first prescription,"--and so forth. Paine, in using the simile, certainly allows the drugs and phials of his sick-room to enter it to a disagreeable extent, but we must bear in mind that we are looking over his shoulder. We must also, by the same consideration of its privacy, mitigate the letter's egotism. Wakefield's ant-hill protected by the foliage, the "civic crown," of Paine's oak which it has attacked,--gaining notice by the importance of the work it belittles,--were admirable if written by another; and the egotism is not without some warrant. It is the rebuke of a scarred veteran of the liberal army to the insults of a subaltern near twenty years his junior.

It was no doubt taken to heart For when the agitation which Gilbert Wakefield had contributed to swell, and to lower, presently culminated in handcuffs for the circulators of Paine's works, he was filled with anguish. He vainly tried to resist the oppression, and to call back the Unitarians, who for twenty-five years continued to draw attention from their own heresies by hounding on the prosecution of Paine's adherents.*

* "But I would not forcibly suppress this book ["Age of Reason"]; much less would I punish (O my G.o.d, be such wickedness far from me, or leave me dest.i.tute of thy favour in the midst of this perjured and sanguinary generation!) much less would I punish, by fine or imprisonment, from any possible consideration, the publisher or author of these pages."--Letter of Gilbert Wakefield to Sir John Scott, Attorney General, 1798. For evidence of Unitarian intolerance see the discourse of W, J. Fox on "The Duties of Christians towards Deists" (Collected Works, vol. i.). In this discourse, October 24, 1819, on the prosecution of Carlile for publishing the "Age of Reason," Mr. Fox expresses his regret that the first prosecution should have been conducted by a Unitarian. "Goaded," he says, "by the calumny which would identify them with those who yet reject the Saviour, they have, in repelling so unjust an accusation, caught too much of the tone of their opponents, and given the most undesirable proof of their affinity to other Christians by that unfairness towards the disbeliever which does not become any Christian." Ultimately Mr. Fox became the champion of all the principles of "The Age of Reason" and "The Rights of Man."

The prig perished; in his place stood a martyr of the freedom bound up with the work he had a.s.sailed. Paine's other a.s.sailant, the Bishop of Llandaff, having bent before Pitt, and episcopally censured the humane side he once espoused, Gilbert Wakefield answered him with a boldness that brought on him two years' imprisonment When he came out of prison (1801) he was received with enthusiasm by all of Paine's friends, who had forgotten the wrong so bravely atoned for. Had he not died in the same year, at the age of forty-five, Gilbert Wakefield might have become a standard-bearer of the freethinkers.

Paine's recovery after such prolonged and perilous suffering was a sort of resurrection. In April (1796) he leaves Monroe's house for the country, and with the returning life of nature his strength is steadily recovered. What to the man whose years of anguish, imprisonment, disease, at last pa.s.s away, must have been the paths and hedgerows of Versailles, where he now meets the springtide, and the more healing sunshine of affection! Risen from his th.o.r.n.y bed of pain--