The Life Of Thomas Paine Volume II Part 13

Paine attacks the treaty, which is declared to have put American commerce under foreign dominion. "The sea is not free to her. Her right to navigate is reduced to the right of escaping; that is, until some s.h.i.+p of England or France stops her vessels and carries them into port."

The ministerial misconduct of Gouverneur Morris, and his neglect of American interests, are exposed in a sharp paragraph. Was.h.i.+ngton's military mistakes are relentlessly raked up, with some that he did not commit, and the credit given him for victories won by others heavily discounted.

{1796}

That Was.h.i.+ngton smarted under this pamphlet appears by a reference to it in a letter to David Stuart, January 8, 1797. Speaking of himself in the third person, he says: "Although he is soon to become a private citizen, his opinions are to be knocked down, and his character reduced as low as they are capable of sinking it, even by resorting to absolute falsehoods. As an evidence whereof, and of the plan they are pursuing, I send you a letter of Mr. Paine to me, printed in this city [Philadelphia], and disseminated with great industry." In the same letter he says: "Enclosed you will receive also a production of Peter Porcupine, alias William Cobbett. Making allowances for the asperity of an Englishman, for some of his strong and coa.r.s.e expressions, and a want of official information as to many facts, it is not a bad thing."*

Cobbett's answer to Paine's personal grievance was really an arraignment of the President. He undertakes to prove that the French Convention was a real government, and that by members.h.i.+p in it Paine had forfeited his American citizens.h.i.+p. But Monroe had formally claimed Paine as an American citizen, and the President had officially endorsed that claim.

That this approval was unknown to Cobbett is a remarkable fact, showing that even such small and tardy action in Paine's favor was kept secret from the President's new British and Federalist allies.

* "Porcupine's Political Censor, for December, 1796. A Letter to the Infamous Tom. Paine, in answer to his letter to General Was.h.i.+ngton."

For the rest it is a pity that Was.h.i.+ngton did not specify the "absolute falsehoods" in Paine's pamphlet, if he meant the phrase to apply to that. It might a.s.sist us in discovering just how the case stood in his mind. He may have been indignant at the suggestion of his connivance with Paine's imprisonment; but, as a matter of fact, the President had been brought by his Minister into the conspiracy which so nearly cost Paine his life.

On a review of the facts, my own belief is that the heaviest part of Paine's wrong came indirectly from Great Britain. It was probably one more instance of Was.h.i.+ngton's inability to weigh any injustice against an interest of this country. He ignored compacts of capitulation in the cases of Burgoyne and Asgill, in the Revolution; and when convinced that this nation must engage either in war or commercial alliance with England he virtually broke faith with France.*

* In a marginal note on Monroe's "View, etc.," found among his papers, Was.h.i.+ngton writes: "Did then the situation of our affairs admit of any other alternative than negotiation or war?" (Sparks' "Was.h.i.+ngton," xi., P- 505). Since writing my "Life of Randolph," in which the history of the British treaty is followed, I found in the French Archives ( etats- Unis, vol. ii., doc. 12) Minister Fauchet's report of a conversation with Secretary Randolph in which he (Randolph) said: "What would you have us do? We could not end our difficulties with the English but by a war or a friendly treaty. We were not prepared for war; it was necessary to negotiate." It is now tolerably certain that there was "bluff" on the part of the British players, in London and Philadelphia, but it won.

To the new alliance he sacrificed his most faithful friends Edmund Randolph and James Monroe; and to it, mainly, was probably due his failure to express any interest in England's outlaw, Paine. For this might gain publicity and offend the government with which Jay was negotiating. Such was George Was.h.i.+ngton. Let justice add that he included himself in the list of patriotic martyrdoms. By sacrificing France and embracing George III. he lost his old friends, lost the confidence of his own State, incurred denunciations that, in his own words, "could scarcely be applied to a Nero, a notorious defaulter, or even to a common pickpocket." So he wrote before Paine's pamphlet appeared, which, save in the personal matter, added nothing to the general accusations. It is now forgotten that with one exception--Johnson--no President ever went out of office so loaded with odium as Was.h.i.+ngton. It was the penalty of Paine's power that, of the thousand reproaches, his alone survived to recoil on his memory when the issues and the circ.u.mstances that explain if they cannot justify his pamphlet, are forgotten. It is easy for the Was.h.i.+ngton wors.h.i.+pper of to-day to condemn Paine's pamphlet, especially as he is under no necessity of answering it. But could he imagine himself abandoned to long imprisonment and imminent death by an old friend and comrade, whose letters of friends.h.i.+p he cherished, that friend avowedly able to protect him, with no apparent explanation of the neglect but deference to an enemy against whom they fought as comrades, an unprejudiced reader would hardly consider Paine's letter unpardonable even where unjust. Its tremendous indignation is its apology so far as it needs apology. A man who is stabbed cannot be blamed for crying out. It is only in poetry that dying Desdemonas exonerate even their deluded slayers. Paine, who when he wrote these personal charges felt himself dying of an abscess traceable to Was.h.i.+ngton's neglect, saw not Iago behind the President.

His private demand for explanation, sent through Bache, was answered only with cold silence. "I have long since resolved," wrote Was.h.i.+ngton to Governor Stone (December 6, 1795), "for the present time at least, to let my calumniators proceed without any notice being taken of their invectives by myself, or by any others with my partic.i.p.ation or knowledge." But now, nearly a year later, comes Paine's pamphlet, which is not made up of invectives, but of statements of fact. If, in this case, Was.h.i.+ngton sent, to one friend at least, Cobbett's answer to Paine, despite its errors which he vaguely mentions, there appears no good reason why he should not have specified those errors, and Paine's also. By his silence, even in the confidence of friends.h.i.+p, the truth which might have come to light was suppressed beyond his grave. For such silence the best excuse to me imaginable is that, in ignorance of the part Morris had acted, the President's mind may have been in bewilderment about the exact facts.

As for Paine's public letter, it was an answer to Was.h.i.+ngton's unjustifiable refusal to answer his private one. It was the natural outcry of an ill and betrayed man to one whom we now know to have been also betrayed. Its bitterness and wrath measure the greatness of the love that was wounded. The mutual personal services of Was.h.i.+ngton and Paine had continued from the beginning of the American revolution to the time of Paine's departure for Europe in 1787. Although he recognized, as Was.h.i.+ngton himself did, the commander's mistakes Paine had magnified his successes; his all-powerful pen defended him against loud charges on account of the retreat to the Delaware, and the failures near Philadelphia. In those days what "Common Sense" wrote was accepted as the People's verdict. It is even doubtful whether the proposal to supersede Was.h.i.+ngton might not have succeeded but for Paine's fifth _Crisis_.*

* "When a party was forming, in the latter end of seventy- seven and beginning of seventy-eight, of which John Adams was one, to remove Mr. Was.h.i.+ngton from the command of the army, on the complaint that he did nothing, I wrote the fifth number of the Crisis, and published it at Lancaster (Congress then being at Yorktown, in Pennsylvania), to ward off that meditated blow; for though I well knew that the black times of seventy-six were the natural consequence of his want of military judgment in the choice of positions into which the army was put about New York and New Jersey, I could see no possible advantage, and nothing but mischief, that could arise by distracting the army into parties, which would have been the case had the intended motion gone on."-- Paine's Letter iii to the People of the United States (1802).

The personal relations between the two had been even affectionate. We find Paine consulting him about his projected publications at little oyster suppers in his own room; and Was.h.i.+ngton giving him one of his two overcoats, when Paine's had been stolen. Such incidents imply many others never made known; but they are represented in a terrible epigram found among Paine's papers,--"Advice to the statuary who is to execute the statue of Was.h.i.+ngton.

"Take from the mine the coldest, hardest stone, It needs no fas.h.i.+on: it is Was.h.i.+ngton.

But if you chisel, let the stroke be rude, And on his heart engrave--Ingrat.i.tude."

Paine never published the lines. Was.h.i.+ngton being dead, old memories may have risen to restrain him; and he had learned more of the treacherous influences around the great man which had poisoned his mind towards other friends besides himself. For his pamphlet he had no apology to make. It was a thing inevitable, volcanic, and belongs to the history of a period prolific in intrigues, of which both Was.h.i.+ngton and Paine were victims.

CHAPTER XI. "THE AGE OF REASON"

The reception which the "Age of Reason" met is its sufficient justification. The chief priests and preachers answered it with personal abuse and slander, revealing by such fruits the nature of their tree, and confessing the feebleness of its root, either in reason or human affection.

Lucian, in his "[--Greek--]" represents the G.o.ds as invisibly present at a debate, in Athens, on their existence. Damis, who argues from the evils of the world that there are no G.o.ds, is answered by Timocles, a theological professor with large salary. The G.o.ds feel doleful, as the argument goes against them, until their champion breaks out against Damis,--"You blasphemous villain, you! Wretch! Accursed monster!" The chief of the G.o.ds takes courage, and exclaims: "Well done, Timocles!

give him hard words. That is your strong point. Begin, to reason and you will be dumb as a fish."

So was it in the age when the Twilight of the G.o.ds was brought on by faith in the Son of Man. Not very different was it when this Son of Man, dehumanized by despotism, made to wield the thunderbolts of Jove, reached in turn his inevitable Twilight. The man who pointed out the now admitted survivals of Paganism in the despotic system then called Christianity, who said, "the church has set up a religion of pomp and revenue in the pretended imitation of a person whose life was humility and poverty," was denounced as a sot and an adulterer. These accusations, proved in this work unquestionably false, have acc.u.mulated for generations, so that a mountain of prejudice must be tunnelled before any reader can approach the "Age of Reason" as the work of an honest and devout mind.

It is only to irrelevant personalities that allusion is here made. Paine was vehement in his arraignment of Church and Priesthood, and it was fair enough for them to strike back with animadversions on Deism and Infidelity. But it was no answer to an argument against the antiquity of Genesis to call Paine a drunkard, had it been true. This kind of reply was heard chiefly in America. In England it was easy for Paine's chief antagonist, the Bishop of Llandaff, to rebuke Paine's strong language, when his lords.h.i.+p could sit serenely in the House of Peers with knowledge that his opponent was answered with handcuffs for every Englishman who sold his book. But in America, slander had to take the place of handcuffs.

Paine is at times too harsh and militant. But in no case does he attack any person's character. Nor is there anything in his language, wherever objectionable, which I have heard censured when uttered on the side of orthodoxy. It is easily forgotten that Luther desired the execution of a rationalist, and that Calvin did burn a Socinian. The furious language of Protestants against Rome, and of Presbyterians against the English Church, is considered even heroic, like the invective ascribed to Christ, "Generation of vipers, how can you escape the d.a.m.nation of h.e.l.l!" Although vehement language grates on the ear of an age that understands the real forces of evolution, the historic sense remembers that moral revolutions have been made with words hard as cannon-b.a.l.l.s.

It was only when soft phrases about the evil of slavery, which "would pa.s.s away in G.o.d's good time," made way for the abolitionist denunciation of the Const.i.tution as "an agreement with h.e.l.l," that the fortress began to fall. In other words, reforms are wrought by those who are in earnest.* It is difficult in our time to place one's self in the situation of a heretic of Paine's time. Darwin, who is buried in Westminster, remembered the imprisonment of some educated men for opinions far less heretical than his own. George III. egoistic insanity appears (1892) to have been inherited by an imperial descendant, and should Germans be presently punished for their religion, as Paine's early followers were in England, we shall again hear those words that are the "half-battles" preceding victories.

* "In writing upon this, as upon every other subject, I speak a language plain and intelligible. I deal not in hints and intimations. I have several reasons for this: first, that I may be clearly understood; secondly, that it may be seen I am in earnest; and thirdly, because it is an affront to truth to treat falsehood with complaisance."--Paine's reply to Bishop Watson.

There is even greater difficulty in the appreciation by one generation of the inner sense of the language of a past one. The common notion that Paines "Age of Reason" abounds in "vulgarity" is due to the lack of literary culture in those--probably few--who have derived that impression from its perusal. It is the fate of all genius potent enough to survive a century that its language will here and there seem coa.r.s.e.

The thoughts of Boccaccio, Rabelais, Shakespeare,--whose works are commonly expurgated,--are so modern that they are not generally granted the allowances conceded to writers whose ideas are as antiquated as their words. Only the instructed minds can set their cla.s.sic nudities in the historic perspective that reveals their innocency and value. Paine's book has done as much to modify human belief as any ever written. It is one of the very few religious works of the last century which survives in unsectarian circulation. It requires a scholarly perception to recognize in its occasional expressions, by some called "coa.r.s.e," the simple Saxon of Nor-folks.h.i.+re. Similar expressions abound in pious books of the time; they are not censured, because they are not read. His refined contemporary antagonists--Dr. Watson and Dr. Priestley--found no fault with Paine's words, though the former twice accuses his a.s.sertions as "indecent." In both cases, however, Paine is pointing out some biblical triviality or indecency--or what he conceived such. I have before me original editions of both Parts of the "Age of Reason" printed from Paine's ma.n.u.scripts. Part First may be read by the most prudish parent to a daughter, without an omission. In Part Second six or seven sentences might be omitted by the parent, where the writer deals, without the least prurience, with biblical narratives that can hardly be daintily touched. Paine would have been astounded at the suggestion of any impropriety in his expressions. He pa.s.ses over four-fifths of the pa.s.sages in the Bible whose grossness he might have cited in support of his objection to its immorality. "Obscenity," he says, "in matters of faith, however wrapped up, is always a token of fable and imposture; for it is necessary to our serious belief in G.o.d that we do not connect it with stories that run, as this does, into ludicrous interpretations. The story [of the miraculous conception] is, upon the face of it, the same kind of story as that of Jupiter and Leda."

* "An Apology for the Bible. By R. Llandaff" [Dr.

Richard Watson].

Another fostered prejudice supposes "The Age of Reason" largely made up of scoffs. The Bishop of Llandaff, in his reply to Paine, was impressed by the elevated Theism of the work, to portions of which he ascribed "a philosophical sublimity." Watson apparently tried to constrain his ecclesiastical position into English fair play, so that his actual failures to do so were especially misleading, as many knew Paine only as represented by this eminent antagonist. For instance, the Bishop says, "Moses you term a c.o.xcomb, etc." But Paine, commenting on Numbers xii., 3, "Moses was very meek, above all men," had argued that Moses could not have written the book, for "If Moses said this of himself he was a c.o.xcomb." Again the Bishop says Paine terms Paul "a fool." But Paine had quoted from Paul, "'Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.' To which [he says] one might reply in his own language, and say, 'Thou fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die not.'"

No intellect that knows the law of literature, that deep answers only unto deep, can suppose that the effect of Paine's "Age of Reason," on which book the thirty years' war for religious freedom in England was won, after many martyrdoms, came from a scoffing or scurrilous work. It is never Paine's object to raise a laugh; if he does so it is because of the miserable baldness of the dogmas, and the ignorant literalism, consecrated in the popular mind of his time. Through page after page he peruses the Heavens, to him silently declaring the glory of G.o.d, and it is not laughter but awe when he asks, "From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit, that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple!"

In another work Paine finds allegorical truth in the legend of Eden. The comparative mythlogists of to-day, with many sacred books of the East, can find mystical meaning and beauty in many legends of the Bible wherein Paine could see none, but it is because of their liberation by the rebels of last century from bondage to the pettiness of literalism.

Paine sometimes exposes an absurdity with a taste easily questionable by a generation not required like his own to take such things under foot of the letter. But his spirit is never flippant, and the sentences that might so seem to a casual reader are such as Browning defended in his "Christmas Eve."

"If any blames me, Thinking that merely to touch in brevity The topics I dwell on, were unlawful-- Or, worse, that I trench, with undue levity, On the bounds of the Holy and the awful, I praise the heart, and pity the head of him, And refer myself to Thee, instead of him; Who head and heart alike discernest, Looking below light speech we utter, When the frothy spume and frequent sputter Prove that the soul's depths boil in earnest!"

Even Dr. James Martineau, whose reverential spirit no one can question, once raised a smile in his audience, of which the present writer was one, by saying that the account of the temptation of Jesus, if true, must have been reported by himself, or "by the only other party present." Any allusion to the devil in our day excites a smile. But it was not so in Paine's day, when many crossed themselves while speaking of this dark prince. Paine has "too much respect for the moral character of Christ" to suppose that he told the story of the devil showing him all the kingdoms of the world. "How happened it that he did not discover America; or is it only with kingdoms that his sooty highness has any interest?" This is not flippancy; it was by following the inkstand Luther threw at the devil with equally vigorous humor that the grotesque figure was eliminated, leaving the reader of to-day free to appreciate the profound significance of the Temptation.

How free Paine is from any disposition to play to pit or gallery, any more than to dress circle, is shown in his treatment of the Book of Jonah. It is not easy to tell the story without exciting laughter; indeed the proverbial phrases for exaggeration,--"a whale," a "fish story,"--probably came from Jonah. Paine's smile is slight. He says, "it would have approached nearer to the idea of a miracle if Jonah had swallowed the whale"; but this is merely in pa.s.sing to an argument that miracles, in the early world, would hardly have represented Divinity.

Had the fish cast up Jonah in the streets of Nineveh the people would probably have been affrighted, and fancied them both devils. But in the second Part of the work there is a very impressive treatment of the Book of Jonah. This too is introduced with a pa.s.sing smile--"if credulity could swallow Jonah and the whale it could swallow anything." But it is precisely to this supposed "scoffer" that we owe the first interpretation of the profound and pathetic significance of the book, lost sight of in controversies about its miracle. Paine antic.i.p.ates Baur in p.r.o.nouncing it a poetical work of Gentile origin. He finds in it the same lesson against intolerance contained in the story of the reproof of Abraham for piously driving the suffering fire-wors.h.i.+pper from his tent.

(This story is told by the Persian Saadi, who also refers to Jonah: "And now the whale swallowed Jonah: the sun set.") In the prophet mourning for his withered gourd, while desiring the destruction of a city, Paine finds a satire; in the divine rebuke he hears the voice of a true G.o.d, and one very different from the deity to whom the Jews ascribed ma.s.sacres. The same critical ac.u.men is shown in his treatment of the Book of Job, which he believes to be also of Gentile origin, and much admires.

The large Paine Mythology cleared aside, he who would learn the truth about this religious teacher will find in his way a misleading literature of uncritical eulogies. Indeed the pious prejudices against Paine have largely disappeared, as one may see by comparing the earlier with the later notices of him in religious encyclopaedias. But though he is no longer placed in an infernal triad as in the old hymn--"The world, the devil, and Tom Paine"--and his political services are now candidly recognized, he is still regarded as the propagandist of a bald illiterate deism. This, which is absurdly unhistorical, Paine having been dealt with by eminent critics of his time as an influence among the educated, is a sequel to his long persecution. For he was relegated to the guardians.h.i.+p of an unlearned and undiscriminating radicalism, little able to appreciate the niceties of his definitions, and was gilded by its defensive commonplaces into a figurehead. Paine therefore has now to be saved from his friends more perhaps than from his enemies. It has been shown on a former page that his governmental theories were of a type peculiar in his time. Though such writers as Spencer, Frederic Harrison, Bagehot, and Dicey have familiarized us with his ideas, few of them have the historic perception which enables Sir George Trevelyan to recognize Paine's connection with them. It must now be added that Paine's religion was of a still more peculiar type. He cannot be cla.s.sed with deists of the past or theists of the present. Instead of being the mere iconoclast, the militant a.s.sailant of Christian beliefs, the "infidel" of pious slang, which even men who should know better suppose, he was an exact thinker, a slow and careful writer, and his religious ideas, developed through long years, require and repay study.

The dedication of "The Age of Reason" places the work under the "protection" of its authors fellow-citizens of the United States. To-day the trust comes to many who really are such as Paine supposed all of his countrymen to be,--just and independent lovers of truth and right.

We shall see that his trust was not left altogether unfulfilled by a mult.i.tude of his contemporaries, though they did not venture to do justice to the man. Paine had idealized his countrymen, looking from his prison across three thousand miles. But, to that vista of s.p.a.ce, a century of time had to be added before the book which fanatical Couthon suppressed, and the man whom murderous Barrere sentenced to death, could both be fairly judged by educated America.

"The Age of Reason" is in two Parts, published in successive years.

These divisions are interesting as memorials of the circ.u.mstances under which they were written and published,--in both cases with death evidently at hand. But taking the two Parts as one work, there appears to my own mind a more real division: a part written by Paine's century, and another originating from himself. Each of these has an important and traceable evolution.

I. The first of these divisions may be considered, fundementally, as a continuation of the old revolution against arbitrary authority.

Carlyle's humor covers a profound insight when he remarks that Paine, having freed America with his "Common Sense," was resolved to free this whole world, and perhaps the other! All the authorities were and are interdependent. "If thou release this man thou art not Caesar's friend,"

cried the Priest to Pilate. The proconsul must face the fact that in Judea Caesarism rests on the same foundation with Jahvism. Authority leans on authority; none can stand alone. It is still a question whether political revolutions cause or are caused by religious revolutions.

Buckle maintained that the French Revolution was chiefly due to the previous overthrow of spiritual authority; Rocquain, that the political _regime_ was shaken before the philosophers arose.* In England religious changes seem to have usually followed those of a political character, not only in order of time, but in character. In beginning the "Age of Reason," Paine says:

* Felix Rocquain's fine work, L'Esprit revolutionnaire avant la Revolution," though not speculative, ill.u.s.trates the practical nature of revolution,--an uncivilized and often retrograde form of evolution.

"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 priestcraft would be detected; and man would return to the pure, unmixed, and unadulterated belief of one G.o.d and no more."

The historical continuity of the critical negations of Paine with the past is represented in his t.i.tle. The Revolution of 1688,--the secular arm transferring the throne from one family to another,--brought the monarchical superst.i.tion into doubt; straightway the Christian authority was shaken.

One hundred years before Paine's book, appeared Charles Blount's "Oracles of Reason." Macaulay describes Blount as the head of a small school of "infidels," troubled with a desire to make converts; his delight was to worry the priests by asking them how light existed before the sun was made, and where Eve found thread to st.i.tch her fig-leaves.

But to this same Blount, Macaulay is constrained to attribute emanc.i.p.ation of the press in England.

Blount's t.i.tle was taken up in America by Ethan Allen, leader of the "Green Mountain Boys." Allen's "Oracles of Reason" is forgotten; he is remembered by his demand (1775) for the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga, "in the name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The last five words of this famous demand would have been a better t.i.tle for the book. It introduces the nation to a Jehovah qualified by the Continental Congress. Ethan Allen's deity is no longer a King of kings: arbitrariness has disappeared; men are summoned to belief in a governor administering laws inherent in the const.i.tution of a universe co-eternal with himself, and with which he is interdependent. His administration is not for any divine glory, but, in antic.i.p.ation of our const.i.tutional preamble, to "promote the general welfare." The old Puritan alteration in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Commonwealth come!" would in Allen's church have been "Thy Republic come!" That is, had he admitted prayer, which to an Executive is of course out of place. It must not, however, be supposed that Ethan Allen is conscious that his system is inspired by the Revolution. His book is a calm, philosophical a.n.a.lysis of New England theology and metaphysics; an attempt to clear away the ancient biblical science and set Newtonian science in its place; to found what he conceives "Natural Religion."

In editing his "Account of Arnold's Campaign in Quebec," John Joseph Henry says in a footnote that Paine borrowed from Allen. But the aged man was, in his horror of Paine's religion, betrayed by his memory. The only connection between the books runs above the consciousness of either writer. There was necessarily some resemblance between negations dealing with the same narratives, but a careful comparison of the books leaves me doubtful whether Paine ever read Allen. His t.i.tle may have been suggested by Blount, whose "Oracles of Reason" was in the library of his a.s.sistant at Bor-dentown, John Hall. The works are distinct in aim, products of different religious climes. Allen is occupied mainly with the metaphysical, Paine with quite other, aspects of their common subject. There is indeed a conscientious originality in the freethinkers who successively availed themselves of the era of liberty secured by Blount. Collins, Bolingbroke, Hume, Toland, Chubb, Woolston, Tindal, Middleton, Annet, Gibbon,--each made an examination for himself, and represents a distinct chapter in the religious history of England.

Annet's "Free Inquirer," aimed at enlightenment of the lower cla.s.ses, proved that free thought was tolerated only as an aristocratic privilege; the author was pilloried, just thirty years before the cheapening of the "Rights of Man" led to Paine's prosecution. Probably Morgan did more than any of the deists to prepare English ground for Paine's sowing, by severely criticising the Bible by a standard of civilized ethics, so far as ethics were civilized in the early eighteenth century. But none of these writers touched the deep chord of religious feeling in, the people. The English-speaking people were timid about venturing too much on questions which divided the learned, and were content to express their protest against the worldliness of the Church and faithlessness to the lowly Saviour, by following pietists and enthusiasts. The learned clergy, generally of the wealthy cla.s.ses, were largely deistical, but conservative. They gradually perceived that the political and the theological authority rested on the same foundation.