A Short History of Freethought Ancient and Modern, Volume 2 of 2 by J. M. Robertson

proposition than the case of Thomas Paine, the virtual founder of modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States. [1653] It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death from the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he had long held pronounced deistic opinions. [1654] They were probably matured in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often privately held, though there, as Franklin is said to have jesuitically declared in his old age, by way of encouraging immigration: "Atheism is unknown; infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age in this country without having their piety shocked by meeting with either an atheist or an infidel." Paine did an unequalled service to the American Revolution by his Common Sense and his series of pamphlets headed The Crisis: there is, in fact, little question that but for the intense stimulus thus given by him at critical moments the movement might have collapsed at an early stage. Yet he seems to have had no thought there and then of avowing his deism. It was in part for the express purpose of resisting the ever-strengthening attack of atheism in France on deism itself that he undertook to save it by repudiating the Judæo-Christian revelation; and it is not even certain that he would have issued the Age of Reason when it did appear, had he not supposed he was going to his death when put under arrest, on which score he left the manuscript for publication. [1655]