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Title: The
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Produced
by Norman M. Wolcott.
[Redactor’s Note: The text is reproduced from The
Writings of Thomas Paine Collected and Edited by Moncure Daniel Conway, Vol.
IV 1894 - 1896. In this version the notes are enclosed in square brackets.
A Table of contents for this part has been added not found in the
printed edition.]
VOLUME
IV.
by
Thomas Paine (1796)
Chapter
I - The Author’s Profession Of Faith
Chapter
II - Of Missions And Revelations
Chapter
III - Concerning The Character of Jesus Christ, And His History
Chapter
IV - Of The Bases Of Christianity
Chapter
V - Examination In Detail Of The Preceding Bases
Chapter
VI - Of The True Theology
Chapter
VII - Examination Of The Old Testament
Chapter
VIII - Of The New Testament
Chapter
IX - In What The True Revelation Consists
Chapter
X - Concerning God, And The Lights Cast On His Existence And
Chapter
XI - Of The Theology Of The Christians; And The True Theology
Chapter
XII - The Effects Of Christianism On Education; Proposed Reforms
Chapter
XIII - Comparison Of Christianism With The Religious Ideas
Inspired
By Nature
Chapter
XIV - System Of The Universe
Chapter
XV - Advantages Of The Existence Of Many Worlds In Each Solar
Chapter
XVI - Applications Of The Preceding To The System Of The
Chapter
XVII - Of The Means Employed In All Time, And Almost
Universally,
To Deceive The Peoples
Recapitulation
Part
Two
Preface
Chapter
I - The Old Testament
Chapter
II - The New Testament
Chapter
III - Conclusion
EDITOR’S
INTRODUCTION
WITH
SOME RESULTS OF RECENT RESEARCHES.
IN
the opening year, 1793, when revolutionary France had beheaded its king, the
wrath turned next upon the King of kings, by whose grace every tyrant claimed
to reign. But eventualities had brought among them a great English and
American heart—Thomas Paine. He had pleaded for Louis Caper—“Kill the
king but spare the man.” Now he pleaded, -- “Disbelieve in the King of
kings, but do not confuse with that idol the Father of Mankind!”
In
Paine’s Preface to the Second Part of “The Age of Reason” he describes
himself as writing the First Part near the close of the year 1793. “I had
not finished it more than six hours, in the state it has since appeared,
before a guard came about three in the morning, with an order signed by the
two Committees of Public Safety and Surety General, for putting me in
arrestation.” This was on the morning of December 28. But it is necessary to
weigh the words just quoted—“in the state it has since appeared.” For on
August 5, 1794, Francois Lanthenas, in an appeal for Paine’s liberation,
wrote as follows: “I deliver to Merlin de Thionville a copy of the last work
of T. Payne [The Age of Reason], formerly our colleague, and in custody since
the decree excluding foreigners from the national representation. This book
was written by the author in the beginning of the year ‘93 (old style). I
undertook its translation before the revolution against priests, and it was
published in French about the same time. Couthon, to whom I sent it, seemed
offended with me for having translated this work.”
Under
the frown of Couthon, one of the most atrocious colleagues of Robespierre,
this early publication seems to have been so effectually suppressed that no
copy bearing that date, 1793, can be found in France or elsewhere. In Paine’s
letter to Samuel Adams, printed in the present volume, he says that he had it
translated into French, to stay the progress of atheism, and that he
endangered his life “by opposing atheism.” The time indicated by Lanthenas
as that in which he submitted the work to Couthon would appear to be the
latter part of March, 1793, the fury against the priesthood having reached its
climax in the decrees against them of March 19 and 26. If the moral deformity
of Couthon, even greater than that of his body, be remembered, and the
readiness with which death was inflicted for the most theoretical opinion not
approved by the “Mountain,” it will appear probable that the offence given
Couthon by Paine’s book involved danger to him and his translator. On May
31, when the Girondins were accused, the name of Lanthenas was included, and
he barely escaped; and on the same day Danton persuaded Paine not to appear in
the Convention, as his life might be in danger. Whether this was because of
the “Age of Reason,” with its fling at the “Goddess Nature” or not,
the statements of author and translator are harmonized by the fact that Paine
prepared the manuscript, with considerable additions and changes, for
publication in English, as he has stated in the Preface to Part II.
A
comparison of the French and English versions, sentence by sentence, proved to
me that the translation sent by Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville in 1794 is
the same as that he sent to Couthon in 1793. This discovery was the means of
recovering several interesting sentences of the original work. I have given as
footnotes translations of such clauses and phrases of the French work as
appeared to be important. Those familiar with the translations of Lanthenas
need not be reminded that he was too much of a literalist to depart from the
manuscript before him, and indeed he did not even venture to alter it in an
instance (presently considered) where it was obviously needed. Nor would
Lanthenas have omitted any of the paragraphs lacking in his translation. This
original work was divided into seventeen chapters, and these I have restored,
translating their headings into English. The “Age of Reason” is thus for
the first time given to the world with nearly its original completeness.
It
should be remembered that Paine could not have read the proof of his “Age of
Reason” (Part I.) which went through the press while he was in prison. To
this must be ascribed the permanence of some sentences as abbreviated in the
haste he has described. A notable instance is the dropping out of his estimate
of Jesus the words rendered by Lanthenas “trop peu imite, trop oublie, trop
meconnu.” The addition of these words to Paine’s tribute makes it the more
notable that almost the only recognition of the human character and life of
Jesus by any theological writer of that generation came from one long branded
as an infidel.
To
the inability of the prisoner to give his work any revision must be attributed
the preservation in it of the singular error already alluded to, as one that
Lanthenas, but for his extreme fidelity, would have corrected. This is Paine’s
repeated mention of six planets, and enumeration of them, twelve years after
the discovery of Uranus. Paine was a devoted student of astronomy, and it
cannot for a moment be supposed that he had not participated in the universal
welcome of Herschel’s discovery. The omission of any allusion to it
convinces me that the astronomical episode was printed from a manuscript
written before 1781, when Uranus was discovered.
Unfamiliar with French in 1793, Paine might not have discovered the
erratum in Lanthenas’ translation, and, having no time for copying, he would
naturally use as much as possible of the same manuscript in preparing his work
for English readers. But he had no opportunity of revision, and there remains
an erratum which, if my conjecture be correct, casts a significant light on
the paragraphs in which he alludes to the preparation of the work. He states
that soon after his publication of “Common Sense” (1776), he “saw the
exceeding probability that a revolution in the system of government would be
followed by a revolution in the system of religion,” and that “man would
return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God and no more.”
He tells Samuel Adams that it had long been his intention to publish his
thoughts upon religion, and he had made a similar remark to John Adams in
1776. Like the Quakers among whom he was reared Paine could then readily use
the phrase “word of God” for anything in the Bible which approved itself
to his “inner light,” and as he had drawn from the first Book of Samuel a
divine condemnation of monarchy, John Adams, a Unitarian, asked him if he
believed in the inspiration of the Old Testament. Paine replied that he did
not, and at a later period meant to publish his views on the subject. There is
little doubt that he wrote from time to time on religious points, during the
American war, without publishing his thoughts, just as he worked on the
problem of steam navigation, in which he had invented a practicable method
(ten years before John Fitch made his discovery) without publishing it. At any
rate it appears to me certain that the part of “The Age of Reason”
connected with Paine’s favorite science, astronomy, was written before 1781,
when Uranus was discovered.
Paine’s
theism, however invested with biblical and Christian phraseology, was a
birthright. It appears clear from several allusions in “The Age of Reason”
to the Quakers that in his early life, or before the middle of the eighteenth
century, the people so called were substantially Deists. An interesting
confirmation of Paine’s statements concerning them appears as I write in an
account sent by Count Leo Tolstoi to the London ‘Times’ of the Russian
sect called Dukhobortsy (The Times, October 23, 1895). This sect sprang up in
the last century, and the narrative says:
“The
first seeds of the teaching called afterwards ‘Dukhoborcheskaya’ were sown
by a foreigner, a Quaker, who came to Russia. The fundamental idea of his
Quaker teaching was that in the soul of man dwells God himself, and that He
himself guides man by His inner word. God
lives in nature physically and in man’s soul spiritually. To Christ, as to
an historical personage, the Dukhobortsy do not ascribe great importance ...
Christ was God’s son, but only in the sense in which we call, ourselves ‘sons
of God.’ The purpose of Christ’s sufferings was no other than to show us
an example of suffering for truth. The Quakers who, in 1818, visited the
Dukhobortsy, could not agree with them upon these religious subjects; and when
they heard from them their opinion about Jesus Christ (that he was a man),
exclaimed ‘Darkness!’ From the Old and New Testaments,’ they say, ‘we
take only what is useful,’ mostly the moral teaching. ... The moral ideas of
the Dukhobortsy are the following: -- All men are, by nature, equal; external
distinctions, whatsoever they may be, are worth nothing. This idea of men’s
equality the Dukhoborts have directed further, against the State authority.
... Amongst themselves they hold subordination, and much more, a monarchical
Government, to be contrary to their ideas.”
Here
is an early Hicksite Quakerism carried to Russia long before the birth of
Elias Hicks, who recovered it from Paine, to whom the American Quakers refused
burial among them. Although Paine arraigned the union of Church and State, his
ideal Republic was religious; it was based on a conception of equality based
on the divine son-ship of every man. This faith underlay equally his burden
against claims to divine partiality by a “Chosen People,” a Priesthood, a
Monarch “by the grace of God,” or an Aristocracy. Paine’s “Reason”
is only an expansion of the Quaker’s “inner light”; and the greater
impression, as compared with previous republican and deistic writings made by
his “Rights of Man” and “Age of Reason” (really volumes of one work),
is partly explained by the apostolic fervor which made him a spiritual,
successor of George Fox.
Paine’s
mind was by no means skeptical, it was eminently instructive.
That he should have waited until his fifty-seventh year before
publishing his religious convictions was due to a desire to work out some
positive and practicable system to take the place of that which he believed
was crumbling. The English engineer Hall, who assisted Paine in making the
model of his iron bridge, wrote to his friends in England, in 1786: “My
employer has Common Sense enough to disbelieve most of the common systematic
theories of Divinity, but does not seem to establish any for himself.” But
five years later Paine was able to lay the corner-stone of his temple: “With
respect to religion itself, without regard to names, and as directing itself
from the universal family of mankind to the ‘Divine object of all adoration,
it is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart; and though those
fruits may differ from each other like the fruits of the earth, the grateful
tribute of every one, is accepted.” (“Rights of Man.” See my edition of
Paine’s Writings, ii., p. 326.) Here we have a reappearance of George Fox
confuting the doctor in America who “denied the light and Spirit of God to
be in every one; and affirmed that it was not in the Indians. Whereupon I
called an Indian to us, and asked him ‘whether or not, when he lied, or did
wrong to anyone, there was not something in him that reproved him for it?’
He said, ‘There was such a thing in him that did so reprove him; and he was
ashamed when he had done wrong, or spoken wrong.’ So we shamed the doctor
before the governor and the people.” (Journal of George Fox, September
1672.)
Paine,
who coined the phrase “Religion of Humanity” (The Crisis, vii., 1778), did
but logically defend it in “The Age of Reason,” by denying a special
revelation to any particular tribe, or divine authority in any particular
creed of church; and the centenary of this much-abused publication has been
celebrated by a great conservative champion of Church and State, Mr. Balfour,
who, in his “Foundations of Belief,” affirms that “inspiration” cannot
be denied to the great Oriental teachers, unless grapes may be gathered from
thorns.
The
centenary of the complete publication of “The Age of Reason,” (October 25,
1795), was also celebrated at the Church Congress, Norwich, on October 10,
1895, when Professor Bonney, F.R.S., Canon of Manchester, read a paper in
which he said: “I cannot deny that the increase of scientific knowledge has
deprived parts of the earlier books of the Bible of the historical value which
was generally attributed to them by our forefathers. The story of Creation in
the Book of Genesis, unless we play fast and loose either with words or with
science, cannot be brought into harmony with what we have learnt from geology.
Its ethnological statements are imperfect, if not sometimes inaccurate. The
stories of the Fall, of the Flood, and of the Tower of Babel, are incredible
in their present form. Some historical element may underlie many of the
traditions in the first eleven chapters in that book, but this we cannot hope
to recover.” Canon Bonney proceeded to say of the New Testament also, that
“the Gospels are not so far as we know, strictly contemporaneous records, so
we must admit the possibility of variations and even inaccuracies in details
being introduced by oral tradition.” The Canon thinks the interval too short
for these importations to be serious, but that any question of this kind is
left open proves the Age of Reason fully upon us. Reason alone can determine
how many texts are as spurious as the three heavenly witnesses (i John v. 7),
and like it “serious” enough to have cost good men their lives, and
persecutors their charities. When men interpolate, it is because they believe
their interpolation seriously needed. It will be seen by a note in Part II.
of the work, that Paine calls attention to an interpolation introduced
into the first American edition without indication of its being an editorial
footnote. This footnote was: “The book of Luke was carried by a majority of
one only. Vide Moshelm’s Ecc. History.” Dr.
Priestley, then in America, answered Paine’s work, and in quoting
less than a page from the “Age of Reason” he made three alterations, --
one of which changed “church mythologists” into “Christian mythologists,”—and
also raised the editorial footnote into the text, omitting the reference to
Mosheim. Having done this, Priestley writes: “As to the gospel of Luke being
carried by a majority of one only, it is a legend, if not of Mr. Paine’s own
invention, of no better authority whatever.” And so on with further
castigation of the author for what he never wrote, and which he himself
(Priestley) was the unconscious means of introducing into the text within the
year of Paine’s publication.
If
this could be done, unintentionally by a conscientious and exact man, and one
not unfriendly to Paine, if such a writer as Priestley could make four
mistakes in citing half a page, it will appear not very wonderful when I state
that in a modern popular edition of “The Age of Reason,” including both
parts, I have noted about five hundred deviations from the original. These
were mainly the accumulated efforts of friendly editors to improve Paine’s
grammar or spelling; some were misprints, or developed out of such; and some
resulted from the sale in London of a copy of Part Second surreptitiously made
from the manuscript. These facts add significance to Paine’s footnote
(itself altered in some editions!), in which he says: “If this has happened
within such a short space of time, notwithstanding the aid of printing, which
prevents the alteration of copies individually; what may not have happened in
a much greater length of time, when there was no printing, and when any man
who could write, could make a written copy, and call it an original, by
Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John.”
Nothing
appears to me more striking, as an illustration of the far-reaching effects of
traditional prejudice, than the errors into which some of our ablest
contemporary scholars have fallen by reason of their not having studied Paine.
Professor Huxley, for instance, speaking of the freethinkers of the eighteenth
century, admires the acuteness, common sense, wit, and the broad humanity of
the best of them, but says “there is rarely much to be said for their work
as an example of the adequate treatment of a grave and difficult
investigation,” and that they shared with their adversaries “to the full
the fatal weakness of a priori 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
execration, by these very objects of his benevolent intentions, in every
corner of the kingdom?” After the execution of Louis XVI., for whose life
Paine pleaded so earnestly, -- while in England he was denounced as an
accomplice in the deed, -- he devoted himself to the preparation of a
Constitution, and also to gathering up his religious compositions and adding
to them. This manuscript I suppose to have been prepared in what was variously
known as White’s Hotel or Philadelphia House, in Paris, No. 7 Passage des
Petits Peres. This compilation of early and fresh manuscripts (if my theory be
correct) was labelled, “The Age of Reason,” and given for translation to
Francois Lanthenas in March 1793. It is entered, in Qudrard (La France
Literaire) under the year 1793, but with the title “L’Age de la Raison”
instead of that which it bore in 1794, “Le Siecle de la Raison.” The
latter, printed “Au Burcau de l’imprimerie, rue du Theatre-Francais, No.
4,” is said to be by “Thomas Paine, Citoyen et cultivateur de I’Amerique
septentrionale, secretaire du Congres du departement des affaires etrangeres
pendant la guerre d’Amerique, et auteur des ouvrages intitules: LA SENS
COMMUN et LES DROITS DE L’HOMME.”
When
the Revolution was advancing to increasing terrors, Paine, unwilling to
participate in the decrees of a Convention whose sole legal function was to
frame a Constitution, retired to an old mansion and garden in the Faubourg St.
Denis, No. 63. Mr. J.G. Alger, whose researches in personal details connected
with the Revolution are original and useful, recently showed me in the
National Archives at Paris, some papers connected with the trial of Georgeit,
Paine’s landlord, by which it appears that the present No. 63 is not, as I
had supposed, the house in which Paine resided. Mr. Alger accompanied me to
the neighborhood, but we were not able to identify the house.
The arrest of Georgeit is mentioned by Paine in his essay on “Forgetfulness”
(Writings, iii., 319). When his trial came on one of the charges was that he
had kept in his house “Paine and other Englishmen,”—Paine being then in
prison, -- but he (Georgeit) was acquitted of the paltry accusations brought
against him by his Section, the “Faubourg du Nord.” This Section took in
the whole east side of the Faubourg St. Denis, whereas the present No. 63 is
on the west side. After Georgeit (or Georger) had been arrested, Paine was
left alone in the large mansion (said by Rickman to have been once the hotel
of Madame de Pompadour), and it would appear, by his account, that it was
after the execution (October 31, 1793) Of his friends the Girondins, and
political comrades, that he felt his end at hand, and set about his last
literary bequest to the world, --
“The
Age of Reason,”—in the state in which it has since appeared, as he is
careful to say. There was every probability, during the months in which he
wrote (November and December 1793) that he would be executed. His religious
testament was prepared with the blade of the guillotine suspended over him, --
a fact which did not deter pious mythologists from portraying his death-bed
remorse for having written the book.
In
editing Part I. of “The Age of Reason,” I follow closely the first
edition, which was printed by Barrois in Paris from the manuscript, no doubt
under the superintendence of Joel Barlow, to whom Paine, on his way to the
Luxembourg, had confided it. Barlow was an American ex-clergyman, a speculator
on whose career French archives cast an unfavorable light, and one cannot be
certain that no liberties were taken with Paine’s proofs.
I
may repeat here what I have stated in the outset of my editorial work on Paine
that my rule is to correct obvious misprints, and also any punctuation which
seems to render the sense less clear. And to that I will now add that in
following Paine’s quotations from the Bible I have adopted the Plan now
generally used in place of his occasionally too extended writing out of book,
chapter, and verse.
Paine
was imprisoned in the Luxembourg on December 28, 1793, and released on
November 4, 1794. His liberation was secured by his old friend, James Monroe
(afterwards President), who had succeeded his (Paine’s) relentless enemy,
Gouvemeur Morris, as American Minister in Paris. He was found by Monroe more
dead than alive from semi-starvation, cold, and an abscess contracted in
prison, and taken to the Minister’s own residence. It was not supposed that
he could survive, and he owed his life to the tender care of Mr. and Mrs. Monroe. It was while thus a prisoner in his room, with death
still hovering over him, that Paine wrote Part Second of “The Age of Reason.”
The
work was published in London by H.D. Symonds on October 25, 1795, and claimed
to be “from the Author’s manuscript.” It is marked as “Entered at
Stationers Hall,” and prefaced by an apologetic note of “The Bookseller to
the Public,” whose commonplaces about avoiding both prejudice and
partiality, and considering “both sides,” need not be quoted. While his
volume was going through the press in Paris, Paine heard of the publication in
London, which drew from him the following hurried note to a London publisher,
no doubt Daniel Isaacs Eaton:
“SIR,
-- I have seen advertised in the London papers the second Edition [part] of
the Age of Reason, printed, the advertisement says, from the Author’s
Manuscript, and entered at Stationers Hall. I have never sent any manuscript
to any person. It is therefore a forgery to say it is printed from the author’s
manuscript; and I suppose is done to give the Publisher a pretence of Copy
Right, which he has no title to.
“I
send you a printed copy, which is the only one I have sent to London. I wish
you to make a cheap edition of it. I know not by what means any copy has got
over to London. If any person has made a manuscript copy I have no doubt but
it is full of errors. I wish you would talk to Mr. ----- upon this subject as
I wish to know by what means this trick has been played, and from whom the
publisher has got possession of any copy.
Eaton’s
cheap edition appeared January 1, 1796, with the above letter on the reverse
of the title. The blank in the note was probably “Symonds” in the
original, and possibly that publisher was imposed upon. Eaton, already in
trouble for printing one of Paine’s political pamphlets, fled to America,
and an edition of the “Age of Reason” was issued under a new title; no
publisher appears; it is said to be “printed for, and sold by all the
Booksellers in Great Britain and Ireland.” It is also said to be “By
Thomas Paine, author of several remarkable performances.” I have never found
any copy of this anonymous edition except the one in my possession. It is
evidently the edition which was suppressed by the prosecution of Williams for
selling a copy of it.
A
comparison with Paine’s revised edition reveals a good many clerical and
verbal errors in Symonds, though few that affect the sense. The worst are in
the preface, where, instead of “1793,” the misleading date “1790” is
given as the year at whose close Paine completed Part First, -- an error that
spread far and wide and was fastened on by his calumnious American “biographer,”
Cheetham, to prove his inconsistency. The editors have been fairly demoralized
by, and have altered in different ways, the following sentence of the preface
in Symonds: “The intolerant spirit of religious persecution had transferred
itself into politics; the tribunals, styled Revolutionary, supplied the place
of the Inquisition; and the Guillotine of the State outdid the Fire and Faggot
of the Church.” The rogue who copied this little knew the care with which
Paine weighed words, and that he would never call persecution “religious,”
nor connect the guillotine with the “State,” nor concede that with all its
horrors it had outdone the history of fire and faggot. What Paine wrote was:
“The intolerant spirit of church persecution had transferred itself into
politics; the tribunals, styled Revolutionary, supplied the place of an
Inquisition and the Guillotine, of the Stake.”
An
original letter of Paine, in the possession of Joseph Cowen, ex-M.P., which
that gentleman permits me to bring to light, besides being one of general
interest makes clear the circumstances of the original publication. Although
the name of the correspondent does not appear on the letter, it was certainly
written to Col. John Fellows of New York, who copyrighted Part I. of the “Age
of Reason.” He published the pamphlets of Joel Barlow, to whom Paine
confided his manuscript on his way to prison. Fellows was afterwards Paine’s
intimate friend in New York, and it was chiefly due to him that some portions
of the author’s writings, left in manuscript to Madame Bonneville while she
was a freethinker were rescued from her devout destructiveness after her
return to Catholicism. The letter which Mr.
Cowen sends me, is dated at Paris, January 20, 1797.
“SIR,
-- Your friend Mr. Caritat being on the point of his departure for America, I
make it the opportunity of writing to you. I received two letters from you
with some pamphlets a considerable time past, in which you inform me of your
entering a copyright of the first part of the Age of Reason: when I return to
America we will settle for that matter.
“As
Doctor Franklin has been my intimate friend for thirty years past you will
naturally see the reason of my continuing the connection with his grandson. I
printed here (Paris) about fifteen thousand of the second part of the Age of
Reason, which I sent to Mr. F[ranklin] Bache. I gave him notice of it in
September 1795 and the copy-right by my own direction was entered by him. The
books did not arrive till April following, but he had advertised it long
before.
“I
sent to him in August last a manuscript letter of about 70 pages, from me to
Mr. Washington to be printed in a pamphlet. Mr. Barnes of Philadelphia carried
the letter from me over to London to be forwarded to America. It went by the
ship Hope, Cap: Harley, who since his return from America told me that he put
it into the post office at New York for Bache. I have yet no certain account
of its publication. I mention this that the letter may be enquired after, in
case it has not been published or has not arrived to Mr. Bache.
Barnes wrote to me, from London 29 August informing me that he was
offered three hundred pounds sterling for the manuscript. The offer was
refused because it was my intention it should not appear till it appeared in
America, as that, and not England was the place for its operation.
“You
ask me by your letter to Mr. Caritat for a list of my several works, in order
to publish a collection of them. This is an undertaking I have always reserved
for myself. It not only belongs to me of right, but nobody but myself can do
it; and as every author is accountable (at least in reputation) for his works,
he only is the person to do it. If he neglects it in his life-time the case is
altered. It is my intention to return to America in the course of the present
year. I shall then [do] it by subscription, with historical notes. As this
work will employ many persons in different parts of the Union, I will confer
with you upon the subject, and such part of it as will suit you to undertake,
will be at your choice. I have sustained so much loss, by disinterestedness
and inattention to money matters, and by accidents, that I am obliged to look
closer to my affairs than I have done. The printer (an Englishman) whom I
employed here to print the second part of ‘the Age of Reason’ made a
manuscript copy of the work while he was printing it, which he sent to London
and sold. It was by this means that an edition of it came out in London.
“We
are waiting here for news from America of the state of the federal elections.
You will have heard long before this reaches you that the French government
has refused to receive Mr. Pinckney as minister. While Mr. Monroe was minister
he had the opportunity of softening matters with this government, for he was
in good credit with them tho’ they were in high indignation at the
infidelity of the Washington Administration. It is time that Mr. Washington
retire, for he has played off so much prudent hypocrisy between France and
England that neither government believes anything he says.
“Your
friend, etc.,
“THOMAS
PAINE.”
It
would appear that Symonds’ stolen edition must have got ahead of that sent
by Paine to Franklin Bache, for some of its errors continue in all modern
American editions to the present day, as well as in those of England. For in
England it was only the shilling edition— that revised by Paine—which was
suppressed. Symonds, who ministered to the half-crown folk, and who was also
publisher of replies to Paine, was left undisturbed about his pirated edition,
and the new Society for the suppression of Vice and Immorality fastened on one
Thomas Williams, who sold pious tracts but was also convicted (June 24, 1797)
of having sold one copy of the “Age of Reason.” Erskine, who had defended
Paine at his trial for the “Rights of Man,” conducted the prosecution of
Williams. He gained the victory from a packed jury, but was not much elated by
it, especially after a certain adventure on his way to Lincoln’s Inn. He
felt his coat clutched and beheld at his feet a woman bathed in tears. She led
him into the small book-shop of Thomas Williams, not yet called up for
judgment, and there he beheld his victim stitching tracts in a wretched little
room, where there were three children, two suffering with Smallpox. He saw
that it would be ruin and even a sort of murder to take away to prison the
husband, who was not a freethinker, and lamented his publication of the book,
and a meeting of the Society which had retained him was summoned. There was a
full meeting, the Bishop of London (Porteus) in the chair. Erskine reminded
them that Williams was yet to be brought up for sentence, described the scene
he had witnessed, and Williams’ penitence, and, as the book was now
suppressed, asked permission to move for a nominal sentence. Mercy, he urged,
was a part of the Christianity they were defending. Not one of the Society
took his side, -- not even “philanthropic” Wilberforce -- and Erskine
threw up his brief. This action of Erskine led the Judge to give Williams only
a year in prison instead of the three he said had been intended.
While
Williams was in prison the orthodox colporteurs were circulating Erskine’s
speech on Christianity, but also an anonymous sermon “On the Existence and
Attributes of the Deity,” all of which was from Paine’s “Age of Reason,”
except a brief “Address to the Deity” appended. This picturesque anomaly
was repeated in the circulation of Paine’s “Discourse to the
Theophilanthropists” (their and the author’s names removed) under the
title of “Atheism Refuted.” Both of these pamphlets are now before me, and
beside them a London tract of one page just sent for my spiritual benefit.
This is headed “A Word of Caution.” It begins by mentioning the “pernicious
doctrines of Paine,” the first being “that there is No GOD” (sic,) then
proceeds to adduce evidences of divine existence taken from Paine’s works.
It should be added that this one dingy page is the only “survival” of the
ancient Paine effigy in the tract form which I have been able to find in
recent years, and to this no Society or Publisher’s name is attached.
The
imprisonment of Williams was the beginning of a thirty years’ war for
religious liberty in England, in the course of which occurred many notable
events, such as Eaton receiving homage in his pillory at Choring Cross, and
the whole Carlile family imprisoned, -- its head imprisoned more than nine
years for publishing the “Age of Reason.” This last victory of persecution
was suicidal. Gentlemen of wealth, not adherents of Paine, helped in setting
Carlile up in business in Fleet Street, where free-thinking publications have
since been sold without interruption. But though Liberty triumphed in one
sense, the “Age of Reason.” remained to some extent suppressed among those
whose attention it especially merited. Its original prosecution by a Society
for the Suppression of Vice (a device to, relieve the Crown) amounted to a
libel upon a morally clean book, restricting its perusal in families; and the
fact that the shilling book sold by and among humble people was alone
prosecuted, diffused among the educated an equally false notion that the “Age
of Reason” was vulgar and illiterate. The theologians, as we have seen,
estimated more justly the ability of their antagonist, the collaborator of
Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the University of Pennsylvania had
conferred the degree of Master of Arts, -- but the gentry confused Paine with
the class described by Burke as “the swinish multitude.” Skepticism, or
its free utterance, was temporarily driven out of polite circles by its
complication with the out-lawed vindicator of the “Rights of Man.” But
that long combat has now passed away. Time has reduced the “Age of Reason”
from a flag of popular radicalism to a comparatively conservative treatise, so
far as its negations are concerned. An old friend tells me that in his youth
he heard a sermon in which the preacher declared that “Tom Paine was so
wicked that he could not be buried; his bones were thrown into a box which was
bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer; and now Paine
is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!” This variant of the
Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as unconscious homage to the author
whose metaphorical bones may be recognized in buttons now fashionable, and
some even found useful in holding clerical vestments together.
But
the careful reader will find in Paine’s “Age of Reason” something beyond
negations, and in conclusion I will especially call attention to the new
departure in Theism indicated in a passage corresponding to a famous aphorism
of Kant, indicated by a note in Part II. The discovery already mentioned, that
Part I. was written at least fourteen years before Part II., led me to compare
the two; and it is plain that while the earlier work is an amplification of
Newtonian Deism, based on the phenomena of planetary motion, the work of 1795
bases belief in God on “the universal display of himself in the works of the
creation and by that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and
disposition to do good ones.” This exaltation of the moral nature of man to
be the foundation of theistic religion, though now familiar, was a hundred
years ago a new affirmation; it has led on a conception of deity subversive of
last-century deism, it has steadily humanized religion, and its ultimate
philosophical and ethical results have not yet been reached.
CHAPTER
I - THE AUTHOR’S PROFESSION OF FAITH.
IT
has been my intention, for several years past, to publish my thoughts upon
religion; I am well aware of the difficulties that attend the subject, and
from that consideration, had reserved it to a more advanced period of life. I
intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow-citizens of all
nations, and that at a time when the purity of the motive that induced me to
it could not admit of a question, even by those who might disapprove the work.
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.
As
several of my colleagues, and others of my fellow-citizens of France, have
given me the example of making their voluntary and individual profession of
faith, I also will make mine; and I do this with all that sincerity and
frankness with which the mind of man communicates with itself.
I
believe in one God, and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life.
I
believe the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in
doing justice, loving mercy, and endeavoring 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.
It
is impossible to calculate the moral mischief, if I may so express it, that
mental lying has produced in society. When a man has so far corrupted and
prostituted the chastity of his mind, as to subscribe his professional belief
to things he does not believe, he has prepared himself for the commission of
every other crime. He takes up the trade of a priest for the sake of gain,
and, in order to qualify himself for that trade, he begins with a perjury. Can
we conceive anything more destructive to morality than this?
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 had taken place, whether Jewish, Christian,
or Turkish, had 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 priest-craft would be detected; and man would
return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one God, and no more.
CHAPTER
II - OF MISSIONS AND REVELATIONS.
EVERY
national church or religion has established itself by pretending some special
mission from God, communicated to certain individuals. The Jews have their
Moses; the Christians their Jesus Christ, their apostles and saints; and the
Turks their Mahomet; as if the way to God was not open to every man alike.
Each
of those churches shows certain books, which they call revelation, or the Word
of God. The Jews say that their Word of God was given by God to Moses face to
face; the Christians say, that their Word of God came by divine inspiration;
and the Turks say, that their Word of God (the Koran) was brought by an angel
from heaven. Each of those
churches accuses the other of unbelief; and, for my own part, I disbelieve
them all.
As
it is necessary to affix right ideas to words, I will, before I proceed
further into the subject, offer some observations on the word ‘revelation.’
Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately
from God to man.
No
one will deny or dispute the power of the Almighty to make such a
communication if he pleases. But admitting, for the sake of a case, that
something has been revealed to a certain person, and not revealed to any other
person, it is revelation to that person only.
When he tells it to a second person, a second to a third, a third to a
fourth, and so on, it ceases to be a revelation to all those persons. It is
revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and,
consequently, they are not obliged to believe it.
It
is a contradiction in terms and ideas to call anything a revelation that comes
to us at second hand, either verbally or in writing. Revelation is necessarily
limited to the first communication. After this, it is only an account of
something which that person says was a revelation made to him; and though he
may find himself obliged to believe it, it cannot be incumbent on me to
believe it in the same manner, for it was not a revelation made to me, and I
have only his word for it that it was made to him.
When
Moses told the children of Israel that he received the two tables of the
commandments from the hand of God, they were not obliged to believe him,
because they had no other authority for it than his telling them so; and I
have no other authority for it than some historian telling me so, the
commandments carrying no internal evidence of divinity with them. They contain
some good moral precepts such as any man qualified to be a lawgiver or a
legislator could produce himself, without having recourse to supernatural
intervention. [NOTE: It is, however, necessary to except the declamation which
says that God ‘visits the sins of the fathers upon the children’. This is
contrary to every principle of moral justice.
·
Author.]
When
I am told that the Koran was written in Heaven, and brought to Mahomet by an
angel, the account comes to near the same kind of hearsay evidence and second
hand authority as the former. I did not see the angel myself, and therefore I
have a right not to believe it.
When
also I am told that a woman, called the Virgin Mary, said, or gave out, that
she was with child without any cohabitation with a man, and that her betrothed
husband, Joseph, said that an angel told him so, I have a right to believe
them or not: such a circumstance required a much stronger evidence than their
bare word for it: but we have not even this; for neither Joseph nor Mary wrote
any such matter themselves. It is only reported by others that they said so.
It is hearsay upon hearsay, and I do not chose to rest my belief upon such
evidence.
It
is, however, not difficult to account for the credit that was given to the
story of Jesus Christ being the Son of God. He was born when the heathen
mythology had still some fashion and repute in the world, and that mythology
had prepared the people for the belief of such a story. Almost all the
extraordinary men that lived under the heathen mythology were reputed to be
the sons of some of their gods. It
was not a new thing at that time to believe a man to have been celestially
begotten; the intercourse of gods with women was then a matter of familiar
opinion. Their Jupiter, according to their accounts, had cohabited with
hundreds; the story therefore had nothing in it either new, wonderful, or
obscene; it was conformable to the opinions that then prevailed among the
people called Gentiles, or mythologists, and it was those people only that
believed it. The Jews, who had kept strictly to the belief of one God, and no
more, and who had always rejected the heathen mythology, never credited the
story.
It
is curious to observe how the theory of what is called the Christian Church,
sprung out of the tail of the heathen mythology. A direct incorporation took
place in the first instance, by making the reputed founder to be celestially
begotten. The trinity of gods that then followed was no other than a reduction
of the former plurality, which was about twenty or thirty thousand. The statue
of Mary succeeded the statue of Diana of Ephesus. The deification of heroes
changed into the canonization of saints. The Mythologists had gods for
everything; the Christian Mythologists had saints for everything. The church became as crowded with the one, as the pantheon
had been with the other; and Rome was the place of both. The Christian theory
is little else than the idolatry of the ancient mythologists, accommodated to
the purposes of power and revenue; and it yet remains to reason and philosophy
to abolish the amphibious fraud.
CHAPTER
III - CONCERNING THE CHARACTER OF JESUS CHRIST, AND HIS HISTORY.
NOTHING
that is here said can apply, even with the most distant disrespect, to the
real character of Jesus Christ. He was a virtuous and an amiable man. The
morality that he preached and practiced was of the most benevolent kind; and
though similar systems of morality had been preached by Confucius, and by some
of the Greek philosophers, many years before, by the Quakers since, and by
many good men in all ages, it has not been exceeded by any.
Jesus
Christ wrote no account of himself, of his birth, parentage, or anything else.
Not a line of what is called the New Testament is of his writing. The history
of him is altogether the work of other people; and as to the account given of
his resurrection and ascension, it was the necessary counterpart to the story
of his birth. His historians, having brought him into the world in a
supernatural manner, were obliged to take him out again in the same manner, or
the first part of the story must have fallen to the ground.
The
wretched contrivance with which this latter part is told, exceeds everything
that went before it. The first part, that of the miraculous conception, was
not a thing that admitted of publicity; and therefore the tellers of this part
of the story had this advantage, that though they might not be credited, they
could not be detected. They could not be expected to prove it, because it was
not one of those things that admitted of proof, and it was impossible that the
person of whom it was told could prove it himself.
But
the resurrection of a dead person from the grave, and his ascension through
the air, is a thing very different, as to the evidence it admits of, to the
invisible conception of a child in the womb. The resurrection and ascension,
supposing them to have taken place, admitted of public and ocular
demonstration, like that of the ascension of a balloon, or the sun at noon
day, to all Jerusalem at least. A thing which everybody is required to
believe, requires that the proof and evidence of it should be equal to all,
and universal; and as the public visibility of this last related act was the
only evidence that could give sanction to the former part, the whole of it
falls to the ground, because that evidence never was given. Instead of this, a
small number of persons, not more than eight or nine, are introduced as
proxies for the whole world, to say they saw it, and all the rest of the world
are called upon to believe it. But it appears that Thomas did not believe the
resurrection; and, as they say, would not believe without having ocular and
manual demonstration himself. So neither will I; and the reason is equally as
good for me, and for every other person, as for Thomas.
It
is in vain to attempt to palliate or disguise this matter. The story, so far
as relates to the supernatural part, has every mark of fraud and imposition
stamped upon the face of it. Who were the authors of it is as impossible for
us now to know, as it is for us to be assured that the books in which the
account is related were written by the persons whose names they bear. The best
surviving evidence we now have respecting this affair is the Jews. They are
regularly descended from the people who lived in the time this resurrection
and ascension is said to have happened, and they say ‘it is not true.’ It
has long appeared to me a strange inconsistency to cite the Jews as a proof of
the truth of the story. It is just the same as if a man were to say, I will
prove the truth of what I have told you, by producing the people who say it is
false.
That
such a person as Jesus Christ existed, and that he was crucified, which was
the mode of execution at that day, are historical relations strictly within
the limits of probability. He preached most excellent morality, and the
equality of man; but he preached also against the corruptions and avarice of
the Jewish priests, and this brought upon him the hatred and vengeance of the
whole order of priest-hood. The accusation which those priests brought against
him was that of sedition and conspiracy against the Roman government, to which
the Jews were then subject and tributary; and it is not improbable that the
Roman government might have some secret apprehension of the effects of his
doctrine as well as the Jewish priests; neither is it improbable that Jesus
Christ had in contemplation the delivery of the Jewish nation from the bondage
of the Romans. Between the two, however, this virtuous reformer and
revolutionist lost his life. [NOTE: The French work has here:
“However
this may be, for one or the other of these suppositions this virtuous
reformer, this revolutionist, too little imitated, too much forgotten, too
much misunderstood, lost his life.”—Editor. (Conway)]
CHAPTER
IV - OF THE BASES OF CHRISTIANITY.
IT
is upon this plain narrative of facts, together with another case I am going
to mention, that the Christian mythologists, calling themselves the Christian
Church, have erected their fable, which for absurdity and extravagance is not
exceeded by anything that is to be found in the mythology of the ancients.
The
ancient mythologists tell us that the race of Giants made war against Jupiter,
and that one of them threw a hundred rocks against him at one throw; that
Jupiter defeated him with thunder, and confined him afterwards under Mount
Etna; and that every time the Giant turns himself, Mount Etna belches fire. It
is here easy to see that the circumstance of the mountain, that of its being a
volcano, suggested the idea of the fable; and that the fable is made to fit
and wind itself up with that circumstance.
The
Christian mythologists tell that their Satan made war against the Almighty,
who defeated him, and confined him afterwards, not under a mountain, but in a
pit. It is here easy to see that the first fable suggested the idea of the
second; for the fable of Jupiter and the Giants was told many hundred years
before that of Satan.
Thus
far the ancient and the Christian mythologists differ very little from each
other. But the latter have contrived to carry the matter much farther. They
have contrived to connect the fabulous part of the story of Jesus Christ with
the fable originating from Mount Etna; and, in order to make all the parts of
the story tie together, they have taken to their aid the traditions of the
Jews; for the Christian mythology is made up partly from the ancient
mythology, and partly from the Jewish traditions.
The
Christian mythologists, after having confined Satan in a pit, were obliged to
let him out again to bring on the sequel of the fable. He is then introduced
into the garden of Eden in the shape of a snake, or a serpent, and in that
shape he enters into familiar conversation with Eve, who is no ways surprised
to hear a snake talk; and the issue of this tete-a-tate is, that he persuades
her to eat an apple, and the eating of that apple damns all mankind.
After
giving Satan this triumph over the whole creation, one would have supposed
that the church mythologists would have been kind enough to send him back
again to the pit, or, if they had not done this, that they would have put a
mountain upon him, (for they say that their faith can remove a mountain) or
have put him under a mountain, as the former mythologists had done, to prevent
his getting again among the women, and doing more mischief. But instead of
this, they leave him at large, without even obliging him to give his parole.
The secret of which is, that they could not do without him; and after being at
the trouble of making him, they bribed him to stay. They promised him ALL the
Jews, ALL the Turks by anticipation, nine-tenths of the world beside, and
Mahomet into the bargain. After this, who can doubt the bountifulness of the
Christian Mythology?
Having
thus made an insurrection and a battle in heaven, in which none of the
combatants could be either killed or wounded—put Satan into the pit—let
him out again—given him a triumph over the whole creation—damned all
mankind by the eating of an apple, there Christian mythologists bring the two
ends of their fable together. They
represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God
and man, and also the Son of God, celestially begotten, on purpose to be
sacrificed, because they say that Eve in her longing [NOTE: The French work
has: “yielding to an unrestrained appetite.”—
Editor.]
had eaten an apple.
CHAPTER
V - EXAMINATION IN DETAIL OF THE PRECEDING BASES.
PUTTING
aside everything that might excite laughter by its absurdity, or detestation
by its profaneness, and confining ourselves merely to an examination of the
parts, it is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty,
more inconsistent with his wisdom, more contradictory to his power, than this
story is.
In
order to make for it a foundation to rise upon, the inventors were under the
necessity of giving to the being whom they call Satan a power equally as
great, if not greater, than they attribute to the Almighty. They have not only
given him the power of liberating himself from the pit, after what they call
his fall, but they have made that power increase afterwards to infinity.
Before this fall they represent him only as an angel of limited existence, as
they represent the rest. After his fall, he becomes, by their account,
omnipresent. He exists everywhere, and at the same time. He occupies the whole
immensity of space.
Not
content with this deification of Satan, they represent him as defeating by
stratagem, in the shape of an animal of the creation, all the power and wisdom
of the Almighty. They represent him as having compelled the Almighty to the
direct necessity either of surrendering the whole of the creation to the
government and sovereignty of this Satan, or of capitulating for its
redemption by coming down upon earth, and exhibiting himself upon a cross in
the shape of a man.
Had
the inventors of this story told it the contrary way, that is, had they
represented the Almighty as compelling Satan to exhibit himself on a cross in
the shape of a snake, as a punishment for his new transgression, the story
would have been less absurd, less contradictory. But, instead of this they
make the transgressor triumph, and the Almighty fall.
That
many good men have believed this strange fable, and lived very good lives
under that belief (for credulity is not a crime) is what I have no doubt of.
In the first place, they were educated to believe it, and they would have
believed anything else in the same manner.
There are also many who have been so enthusiastically enraptured by
what they conceived to be the infinite love of God to man, in making a
sacrifice of himself, that the vehemence of the idea has forbidden and
deterred them from examining into the absurdity and profaneness of the story.
The more unnatural anything is, the more is it capable of becoming the object
of dismal admiration. [NOTE: The French work has “blind and” preceding
dismal.—Editor.]
CHAPTER
VI - OF THE TRUE THEOLOGY.
BUT
if objects for gratitude and admiration are our desire, do they not present
themselves every hour to our eyes? Do we not see a fair creation prepared to
receive us the instant we are born—a world furnished to our hands, that cost
us nothing? Is it we that light up the sun; that pour down the rain; and fill
the earth with abundance? Whether
we sleep or wake, the vast machinery of the universe still goes on. Are these
things, and the blessings they indicate in future, nothing to, us? Can our
gross feelings be excited by no other subjects than tragedy and suicide? Or is
the gloomy pride of man become so intolerable, that nothing can flatter it but
a sacrifice of the Creator?
I
know that this bold investigation will alarm many, but it would be paying too
great a compliment to their, credulity to forbear it on that account. The
times and the subject demand it to be done. The suspicion that the theory of
what is called the Christian church is fabulous, is becoming very extensive in
all countries; and it will be a consolation to men staggering under that
suspicion, and doubting what to believe and what to disbelieve, to see the
subject freely investigated. I therefore pass on to an examination of the
books called the Old and the New Testament.
CHAPTER
VII - EXAMINATION OF THE OLD TESTAMENT.
THESE
books, beginning with Genesis and ending with Revelations, (which, by the bye,
is a book of riddles that requires a revelation to explain it) are, we are
told, the word of God. It is, therefore, proper for us to know who told us so,
that we may know what credit to give to the report. The answer to this
question is, that nobody can tell, except that we tell one another so. The
case, however, historically appears to be as follows:
When
the church mythologists established their system, they collected all the
writings they could find, and managed them as they pleased. It is a matter altogether of uncertainty to us whether such
of the writings as now appear under the name of the Old and the New Testament,
are in the same state in which those collectors say they found them; or
whether they added, altered, abridged, or dressed them up.
Be
this as it may, they decided by vote which of the books out of the collection
they had made, should be the WORD OF GOD, and which should not. They rejected
several; they voted others to be doubtful, such as the books called the
Apocrypha; and those books which had a majority of votes, were voted to be the
word of God. Had they voted otherwise, all the people since calling themselves
Christians had believed otherwise; for the belief of the one comes from the
vote of the other. Who the people were that did all this, we know nothing of.
They call themselves by the general name of the Church; and this is all
we know of the matter.
As
we have no other external evidence or authority for believing these books to
be the word of God, than what I have mentioned, which is no evidence or
authority at all, I come, in the next place, to examine the internal evidence
contained in the books themselves.
In
the former part of this essay, I have spoken of revelation. I now proceed
further with that subject, for the purpose of applying it to the books in
question.
Revelation
is a communication of something, which the person, to whom that thing is
revealed, did not know before. For if I have done a thing, or seen it done, it
needs no revelation to tell me I have done it, or seen it, nor to enable me to
tell it, or to write it.
Revelation,
therefore, cannot be applied to anything done upon earth of which man is
himself the actor or the witness; and consequently all the historical and
anecdotal part of the Bible, which is almost the whole of it, is not within
the meaning and compass of the word revelation, and, therefore, is not the
word of God.
When
Samson ran off with the gate-posts of Gaza, if he ever did so, (and whether he
did or not is nothing to us,) or when he visited his Delilah, or caught his
foxes, or did anything else, what has revelation to do with these things? If
they were facts, he could tell them himself; or his secretary, if he kept one,
could write them, if they were worth either telling or writing; and if they
were fictions, revelation could not make them true; and whether true or not,
we are neither the better nor the wiser for knowing them. 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 God.
As to the account of the creation, with which the book of Genesis opens, it has all the appearance of being a tradition which the Israelites had among them before they came into Egypt; and after their departure from that country, they put it at the head of their history, without telling, as it is most probable that they did not know, how they came by it. The manner in which the account opens, shows it to be traditionary. It begins abruptly. It is nobody that speaks. It is nobody that hears. It is addressed to nobody. It has neither first, second, nor third person. It has every criterion of being a tradition. It has no voucher. Moses does not take it upon himself by introducing it with the formality that he uses on other occasions, such as that of saying, “The Lords