Justified True Belief

(●) The corset-maker’s son who wrote the pamphlet that made a revolution, and then wrote the book that put the case against the Bible into a labourer’s hands. + Thomas Paine had no university, no patron, and no money. He had spent his twenties and thirties failing: at his father’s trade, at shopkeeping, at marriage, and at a career in the tax service that ended with his goods sold on the street to keep him out of debtors’ prison. He was thirty-seven when he stepped off a ship at Philadelphia so ill with fever that he had to be carried ashore. Within fifteen months he wrote a forty-seven page pamphlet called Common Sense, and a quarrel among Englishmen about taxes became a war for independence. He is on a Christian apologetics site for what he wrote eighteen years later. The Age of Reason is not the deepest attack ever made on Christianity. David Hume, writing in the same decades, was a far better philosopher, and Hume wrote for gentlemen with libraries. Paine wrote for the man at the bench. He put the case against miracles, prophecy, revelation and the atonement into short sentences and cheap print, and the cheap print went everywhere: hawked for a few pence, pirated by the thousand, read aloud in workshops on both sides of the Atlantic. That is the reason a generation of ministers and bishops had to answer him, and the reason they had to answer him in plain English too. One fact about him is worth holding on to before anything else, because almost everyone gets it wrong. Paine was not an atheist. He hated atheism, said so in print, and wrote the book partly to stop the French Revolution from sliding into it. The book opens with a creed: he believed in one God, and hoped for happiness beyond this life.

(●) 1737 AD: Born in Thetford to a Quaker father and an Anglican mother, and taken out of school at about thirteen for the workbench. + Thomas Pain (he added the final e in America) was born at Thetford in Norfolk on 29 January 1737. His father Joseph was a staymaker, a craftsman who cut and stitched the whalebone stays that gave shape to a woman’s corset, and a Quaker. His mother Frances Cocke was the daughter of an attorney and a member of the Church of England, eleven years older than her husband. The household kept both religions at once, which meant the boy grew up inside an argument. The Quaker half left the deeper mark. Quakers had no clergy, no sacraments, no bishops, and no liturgy, which is to say no printed order of service telling the congregation when to stand and what to say; they sat in silence instead and waited for God to speak to any member of the meeting, servant or magistrate alike. A boy raised among them absorbed early that a priest is an unnecessary man, that plain speech is honest speech, and that no person outranks another before God. Every one of those convictions is still visible in the book he wrote in Paris in his fifties. He went to Thetford grammar school and left it at about thirteen to be apprenticed to his father. He did not stay. At about sixteen he ran off to join the crew of a privateer, a privately owned warship licensed to capture enemy shipping and keep the proceeds, and his father caught up with him and brought him home. A few years later he went anyway, and served some months aboard the privateer King of Prussia. Then came a long stretch of ordinary failure: staymaking in one town after another, a shop, a school, and, in 1759, a marriage to Mary Lambert that ended within a year when she died.

(●) 1762 AD: Twelve years in and out of the excise service taught him how government looks from underneath, and ended in dismissal and bankruptcy. + In 1762 Paine joined the excise service and was sent to Grantham, and two years later to Alford on the Lincolnshire coast. An excise officer rode a district on horseback gauging barrels and weighing goods so the crown could tax them, and he was despised for it by everyone he met. The pay was poor, the hours were long, and the temptation to certify goods he had not actually inspected was constant. In August 1765 the board found that he had entered inspections he never made, and dismissed him. He petitioned the following July, humbly and successfully, but there was no vacancy for a while and he went back to cutting stays and keeping school until, in 1768, he was posted to the Sussex town of Lewes. The Lewes years are the ones that made him. He lodged with a tobacconist named Samuel Ollive, argued politics nightly with the Headstrong Club at the White Hart inn, served on the vestry of St Michael’s, the committee that ran the parish and decided which of the town’s poor got relief and how much, and married his late landlord’s daughter Elizabeth in 1771. In 1772 he wrote his first real piece of prose, The Case of the Officers of Excise, a petition on behalf of some three thousand underpaid colleagues asking Parliament for a rise. He spent the winter of 1772 to 1773 in London handing copies to members. Nothing came of it. Everything collapsed in 1774. The shop failed. On 8 April the excise board dismissed him a second time, for leaving his post without leave, and six days later his household goods were auctioned to satisfy his creditors and keep him out of prison. In June he and Elizabeth signed a deed of separation, and he went to London with almost nothing. He was thirty-seven years old and, by every ordinary measure, finished.

(●) 1774 AD: Benjamin Franklin gave him a letter of introduction, and he was carried off the ship at Philadelphia too weak to stand. + In London, through his interest in scientific lectures, Paine met Benjamin Franklin, then in England as agent for the colonies. Franklin heard him out and wrote him a letter of introduction to his son-in-law in Philadelphia, describing him as an ingenious, worthy young man. It is one of the better returns on a piece of paper in the history of letters. The crossing nearly killed him. Ship fever, the typhus that bred in crowded quarters, swept the vessel, and when it docked on 30 November 1774 Paine had to be carried ashore. Six weeks passed before he was well enough to present his letter. Philadelphia in 1775 was the largest city in British America and the most argumentative. Paine found work editing the Pennsylvania Magazine, discovered he could write, and found he had landed in a colony where the thing he had been saying all his life, that ordinary men are the equals of the men set over them, was about to stop being an opinion and start being a war.

(●) 1776 AD: Common Sense in January and The American Crisis in December turned a colonial quarrel into a revolution. + Common Sense appeared on 10 January 1776, anonymously, over the byline "written by an Englishman." Until then most colonists still spoke of their fight as a dispute with Parliament that a reasonable king would settle. Paine told them the king was the problem, that an island could not permanently govern a continent, and that they were arguing about repairs to a house they should be leaving. He wrote it without a single Latin tag or classical flourish, in sentences a farmer could read to his family at the table, and he gave away the profits. Nobody knows exactly how many copies sold. Paine claimed a hundred and fifty thousand, and historians think that high, but no pamphlet in American history had ever moved like it. Within six months the Continental Congress was drafting a declaration. The second pamphlet was written in retreat. Paine had joined the army as aide-de-camp to General Nathanael Greene, which is to say the general’s personal assistant, the officer who carries his orders and writes his letters, and the winter of 1776 found Washington’s force falling back across New Jersey, shrinking as enlistments expired. The American Crisis No. I appeared on 19 December, with most of the men free to go home when the month ended, and it opens with the most famous sentence he ever wrote: "THESE are the times that try men’s souls." A tradition, widely repeated and hard to document, says Washington had it read aloud to the troops before they crossed the Delaware to take Trenton on Christmas night; it goes back to James Cheetham, the hostile biographer who published within months of Paine’s death, and no order, diary or soldier’s letter has ever been found to support it. Whether or not any officer read it that evening, the men crossed, and they won.

(●) 1791 AD: Rights of Man answered Burke, and by the end of 1792 had made him an outlaw in England and a deputy in France. + Paine spent the 1780s partly in America and partly in Europe, absorbed for a while in a design for a single-span iron bridge that he never quite got built. Then in 1790 Edmund Burke published Reflections on the Revolution in France, arguing that a nation inherits its liberties from its ancestors and tears them up at its peril, and Paine answered him. Rights of Man came out in two parts, in 1791 and 1792. The first defends the French Revolution and denies that any generation can bind the ones that follow it. The second goes further than anything else he wrote about government, sketching, in a country that had no such thing, public education, relief for the poor as a right rather than a favour, maternity and funeral payments, and pensions for the old, all costed out in a table. Perhaps two hundred thousand copies circulated in Britain, which terrified the government. The crown prosecuted him for seditious libel, which was the crime of publishing words that stirred up hatred of the king or the government. He was tried in his absence on 18 December 1792, with Thomas Erskine, the finest advocate in England, speaking for him, and he was convicted and declared an outlaw, meaning he could be seized without further trial if he ever set foot in England again. He never did. By then France had made him a citizen and elected him to the National Convention for the Pas-de-Calais, and he took his seat in a legislature whose language he could not speak.

(●) 1793 AD: He argued against killing the king, was jailed for it, and finished The Age of Reason six hours before the guard came. + When the Convention put Louis XVI on trial, Paine agreed the king should be tried and then argued, through an interpreter, that he should not be killed. Execute him and you make a martyr; send him to the United States, where he will see a free country and be forgotten. It was a brave speech to make in Paris in January 1793, and it marked him. By that December the Terror was running, the stretch of months in which the revolutionary government sent thousands to the guillotine on suspicion alone, and foreigners were being purged from the Convention. Paine could see his arrest coming. He had long meant to write out his views on religion, and had always planned to leave the job until the end of his life. Now he sat down and finished the first part of The Age of Reason as fast as he could. By his own account he had not finished it more than six hours before a guard arrived at three in the morning with an order for his arrest, and he contrived on the way to prison to stop at the house of the American poet Joel Barlow and put the manuscript into his hands. He spent ten months in the Luxembourg, a palace on the left bank of the Seine that the revolution had turned into a prison. He was very nearly guillotined, and his own later account of the escape has become famous. The men who collected prisoners for execution marked the doors of the chosen rooms in chalk; his door was standing open and flat against the wall when the mark was made, so that the number ended up on the inside when the door was shut for the night, and, in his words, the destroying angel passed by it. He first attributed his survival to the fever that had left him unconscious, and told the chalk story only years afterwards, apparently after comparing memories with a cellmate. Robespierre fell in July 1794, and in November the new American minister, James Monroe, got him out and took him home to nurse.

(●) 1802 AD: He came back to America, found that the country he had helped to make would not have him, and was buried in 1809 with fewer than a dozen people at the grave. + Paine returned to the United States in the autumn of 1802 at the invitation of President Jefferson. He expected a welcome. What met him was a press campaign of a ferocity that startled even his enemies. He was the infidel, the drunkard, the man who had insulted Washington in an open letter in 1796 and then attacked the Bible. Old friends crossed the street. His biographers record an innkeeper refusing him a bed and a stage refusing him a seat, and in 1806, at New Rochelle, on the farm the state of New York had given him for his services, the election inspectors turned him away from the poll on the ground that he was not an American citizen. He died in Greenwich Village on 8 June 1809, aged seventy-two. He had asked to be buried in a Quaker ground and was refused, so they carried him up to the New Rochelle farm. Fewer than a dozen people came: his friend Marguerite de Bonneville with her two boys, one of them his namesake, the Quaker Willett Hicks, who had put his case for burial to the Friends, as Quakers call themselves, and lost it, one or two others, and two black men who walked out from the town to stand at the grave. The strangest chapter came ten years later. William Cobbett, an English radical who had once written savagely against Paine and then changed his mind entirely, decided England owed him a monument. In 1819 he dug up the bones at night, carried them across the Atlantic, and landed at Liverpool with them in a box. The monument was never built. The bones passed through his estate after his death and were lost, and they have never been found.

What He Taught

(T1) Society is a blessing and government is a necessary evil, so no one is born with a right to rule another. + Picture two things that get muddled together every day. A street where neighbours lend each other ladders, mind each other’s children and bury each other’s dead is one thing. The council that licenses the street, taxes it and polices it is another. Paine’s first move in Common Sense is to pull those two apart and give them different parents: society comes from what we need from each other, government comes from what we do to each other. That distinction sounds mild until you see what he does with it. If government exists only because people misbehave, then it has no dignity of its own. It is a set of arrangements for keeping the peace, to be judged like a roof or a drain, by whether it works. Nothing about it is sacred, and nobody in it is owed reverence. From there the attack on hereditary rule follows in a line. A man may earn respect. He cannot bequeath it, any more than he can bequeath his skill at carpentry to a son who has never held a chisel. Trace the first kings back far enough, he says, and you find nothing better than the principal ruffian of some restless gang, so his measure of worth is moral rather than official. Christians reading this will find much of it familiar and one thing missing. Scripture is quite as unsentimental about rulers as Paine is: it warns Israel exactly what a king will take (1 Samuel 8:11-18), and it never treats power as holy in itself. But Scripture also grounds government in something Paine leaves out. Government exists in the New Testament as a servant of God for good, answerable upward as well as downward (Romans 13:1-4), and human dignity there rests not on the failure of kings but on the image of God in every person (Genesis 1:27).

(Q) "Society in every state is a blessing, but government even in its best state is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one." + Source: Paine, Common Sense, "Of the Origin and Design of Government in General" (1776). The sentence stands in the opening paragraph of the pamphlet’s first section, one line after the complaint that writers have confounded society with government. He goes on: "Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the palaces of kings are built on the ruins of the bowers of paradise." The image is straight out of Genesis, and Paine at this point in his life used it without embarrassment.

(T2) Monarchy is a sin against the kingship of God, and the Bible says so. + Here is the surprise that most readers of The Age of Reason never learn. The heart of the case against kings in Common Sense, the pamphlet that carried America into independence, is several pages of exposition of the Old Testament. Paine knew his audience. Colonial America was full of people who had been told from childhood that the king was set over them by God and that resisting him was rebellion against heaven. Argue with them from natural rights and you get nowhere, because they can simply reply that God has ordained the crown. So Paine went to their own book, and worked through two passages. - Gideon. After Gideon routs the Midianites, the Israelites offer to make him and his sons their hereditary rulers, and he refuses the offer flatly: "I will not rule over you, and my son will not rule over you; the Lord will rule over you" (Judges 8:23). Paine reads the refusal as a denial that they had any such crown to give. - Samuel. Generations later Israel asks Samuel for a king so as to be like the surrounding nations. Samuel is grieved, and God’s answer to him is the hinge of Paine’s whole case: "they have not rejected you, but they have rejected me from being king over them" (1 Samuel 8:7). Samuel then spells out precisely what a king will do to them, and Paine quotes the whole passage, stopping to gloss each item for his own century. Conscription, taxation at a tenth, favourites given the best land: he tells his readers, in effect, that they are reading this morning’s newspaper. His conclusion is blunt. Monarchy is not merely inconvenient. It is idolatry, an honour paid to a man that belongs to God alone, and the English constitution is what happens when that idolatry is given a legal form. Eighteen years later he would call the book he was quoting a fable. He never withdrew the political conclusion he had drawn from it.

(Q) "Monarchy is ranked in scripture as one of the sins of the Jews, for which a curse in reserve is denounced against them." + Source: Paine, Common Sense, "Of Monarchy and Hereditary Succession" (1776). The sentence introduces his walk through Judges 8 and 1 Samuel 8. A few lines earlier he had written that "the will of the Almighty, as declared by Gideon and the prophet Samuel, expressly disapproves of government by kings" (T2). Paine treats the biblical text as authoritative here without the smallest qualification.

(T3) There is one God, and religious duty is doing justice, loving mercy, and making other people happy. + Paine was a deist. The word needs teaching, because it is not a polite name for an atheist. A deist holds that reason alone, looking at the order of the world, establishes a Creator, and that this Creator is owed worship and honest living; what the deist denies is revealed religion, that is, any claim that God has spoken in particular words to particular people through prophets, Scriptures or an incarnation. God, on this view, has written one book only, and it is the universe. He wrote The Age of Reason in a Paris that had abolished the priesthood, and he says in its first pages why he could not simply cheer. In the general wreck of the churches he was afraid France would lose morality and true theology along with the superstition, so he offered his own confession of faith to hold the line at belief in God. What he offers as religious duty is worth reading slowly, because a Christian will recognise it: doing justice, loving mercy, and working for the happiness of others. The first two are almost word for word what the prophet Micah says the Lord requires (Micah 6:8). Paine had the prophets in his bones from childhood and drew on them even while denying their authority. What follows the creed is the demolition. He rejects the creed of every church there is, Jewish, Roman, Greek, Turkish and Protestant, and says that his own mind is his own church. Then comes the sentence his enemies quoted for a century: that national institutions of churches are human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind and to monopolise power and profit. He is not describing a doctrine there. He is describing an establishment, a state church with tithes and pews and prosecutions, which was the only kind of church his England had.

(Q) "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." + Source: Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, chapter 1 (Conway edition of the collected writings, 1894 to 1896). The opening profession of the book. Paine wrote it in Paris as several of his colleagues in the Convention were making public professions of their own, and he presents his in the same form, as a citizen’s declaration rather than a treatise.

(T4) A revelation is a revelation only to the person who receives it, and hearsay to everyone else. + Everything else in The Age of Reason leans on one argument, and it deserves to be met at its full strength rather than at a convenient one. Paine grants the premise most freely. Of course God can speak to a person if he wishes; nobody disputes his power to do it. But suppose he does. Suppose something is revealed to Moses on a mountain, and to nobody else. Then it is a revelation to Moses. When Moses comes down and tells Israel, Israel is not receiving a revelation. Israel is receiving a report from a man about a revelation, and a report from a man is testimony, not revelation. Pass it on again and it is a report of a report. The word simply stops applying, and, Paine concludes, nobody down the chain is obliged to believe it. Notice how the argument works on the reader. It does not require you to think Moses a liar, or the apostles frauds. It concedes their sincerity and still leaves you free, because the thing they are offering is not the thing that convinced them. Paine liked this move enough to press it on the Ten Commandments themselves: they carry no internal evidence of divinity, he says, being the sort of decent legislation any competent lawgiver might produce unaided. The positive half of his religion follows from the negative half. If words are local and changeable and cannot carry an unchangeable message to all people, then God must have used a different medium. And so he has. The creation is God’s word, published in every country at once, needing no translator, and impossible for any human being to forge or corrupt. Christians should notice how much of this a believer can accept. The claim that creation itself declares God is not an objection to Scripture; it is in Scripture (Psalm 19:1; Romans 1:19-20). The parting comes over whether God has also spoken in words, and whether the testimony of witnesses is the sort of thing a reasonable person may rest on.

(Q) "It is revelation to the first person only, and hearsay to every other, and, consequently, they are not obliged to believe it." + Source: Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, chapter 2, "Of Missions and Revelations" (Conway edition of the collected writings, 1894 to 1896). He has just defined the word: "Revelation when applied to religion, means something communicated immediately from God to man." The definition is doing the work. Fix the meaning of revelation to first-hand and private, and every witnessed and reported event in Scripture is disqualified before the evidence is examined (T4).

(T5) The poor are owed a share of the earth as a right, not as charity. + The last of Paine’s big ideas is the one that has aged best, and it arrived in a short pamphlet written in the winter of 1795 to 1796 while he was still an invalid in Monroe’s house, recovering from prison. Agrarian Justice begins with a distinction anyone can follow. Some property is natural: the earth, the air, the water, none of it made by anybody. Some property is created: the drained field, the built house, the improved herd. Cultivating land, Paine says, made everything more valuable and was a real achievement, so the improver deserves the improvement. But in the process the ground itself was fenced, and half the human race was quietly dispossessed of an inheritance nobody had ever compensated them for. His proposal is startlingly modern. Tax the passing on of landed estates, put the proceeds in a national fund, and out of that fund pay every person, rich or poor, fifteen pounds sterling on turning twenty-one, and ten pounds a year for life on turning fifty. Not a charity for the deserving poor, means-tested (paid only to those who could prove they were poor enough) and grudged when it came, but a payment to everybody as of right, because everybody was born to a share of the planet. He insists on the distinction with real heat. Charity is what one person chooses to give; justice is what another person is owed. To take the payment as alms is to misunderstand the argument entirely. There is no obvious point where a Christian must object. Scripture builds the same instinct into Israel’s law, where fields are not stripped to the edge so that the poor may glean them (Leviticus 19:9-10), and where land returns to its families in the year of jubilee so that dispossession is never permanent (Leviticus 25:10). Where Paine differs is in his account of why the poor are owed anything. For him it is a debt of compensation for an enclosure long ago; in Scripture it is because the land was never ours in the first place: "The land shall not be sold in perpetuity, for the land is mine" (Leviticus 25:23).

(Q) "It is not charity but a right, not bounty but justice, that I am pleading for." + Source: Paine, Agrarian Justice (1797), concluding observations (Conway edition of the collected writings, 1894 to 1896). The line comes as he closes his calculations. A few sentences later he gives the picture that stayed with his readers: the contrast of affluence and wretchedness meeting in the same street "is like dead and living bodies chained together."

(Q) "THE WORD OF GOD IS THE CREATION WE BEHOLD: And it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man." + Source: Paine, The Age of Reason, Part I, chapter 9, "In What the True Revelation Consists" (Conway edition of the collected writings, 1894 to 1896). The capitals are Paine’s. He has just asked, in the voice of an imagined objector, whether we are then to have no word of God and no revelation at all, and he answers yes, there is one. This is the sentence Christian readers have always found the most interesting thing in the book, because it is half of what they already believe (Psalm 19:1), offered as a replacement for the other half.

What Christian Thinkers Made of Him

(†) He took the case against Christianity out of the gentleman’s library and into the workshop, and the answers had to follow him there. + Almost nothing in The Age of Reason was new. English deists had been making these arguments for a century, and Hume had made the sharpest of them far better. What was new was the price and the prose. Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion were priced and written for men with libraries and a university behind them. Paine’s book was hawked in parts for pennies, pirated by printers who owed him nothing, and written so that a man who had left school at twelve could follow every step. That is why it frightened people who had not been frightened by Hume. The replies came quickly and in the same register. Richard Watson, the Bishop of Llandaff, published An Apology for the Bible in 1796 in the form of eight letters addressed to Paine directly, courteous in tone and detailed in substance, conceding the genuine difficulties and contesting the rest point by point. In America Elias Boudinot, a former President of the Continental Congress, answered with The Age of Revelation in 1801, its subtitle turning Paine’s own title back on him: the age of reason shown to be an age of infidelity. Neither man could afford the old strategy of ignoring an objection until it went away, because their congregations had already read it. The English government tried a different answer, and it went badly. Booksellers who sold the book were prosecuted for blasphemous libel, the crime of publishing an attack on Christianity, which the courts of that day treated as an attack on the law of the land itself, and the bookseller Thomas Williams was convicted in June 1797. The prosecution was led by Thomas Erskine, the same advocate who had defended Paine himself five years before, and the case turned on him. Taken to Williams’s shop by a weeping woman, he found the man stitching tracts in a wretched little room with three children, two of them down with smallpox. Erskine went back to the society that had brought the prosecution, described what he had seen, and asked leave to move for a nominal sentence; mercy, he told them, was part of the Christianity they were defending. Not one of them agreed, so he threw up the brief, and the judge gave Williams a year instead of the three intended. Richard Carlile went to Dorchester gaol in 1819 for publishing the same book, served six years when he would not pay the fine, and edited a paper from his cell throughout. The prosecutions sold more copies than any argument of Paine’s could have. Across the Atlantic the alarm ran through the colleges. Timothy Dwight, president of Yale, preached two discourses to the graduating class in September 1797 on the nature and danger of infidel philosophy, and published them the next year, taking his stand against exactly the fashionable unbelief his students were reading. Historians of the Second Great Awakening, the wave of revivals that ran through American churches from the 1790s into the 1830s, have often treated that anxiety as one of its sparks.

(†) He agreed with the church about more than he knew, and Christian readers have always said so. + Read Paine beside the deists who came after him and something stands out. He kept insisting on God when it would have been easier to drop the subject. He wrote that the French were running toward atheism and he meant to stop them. He wrote a discourse on the existence and attributes of God for a Paris society of Theophilanthropists, deists who met to worship the Creator and practise benevolence, and it was read at one of their meetings. There is a small comedy in the sequel, recorded by his own editor: orthodox tract sellers in England later circulated that discourse with Paine’s name stripped off, under the title Atheism Refuted. The overlap is real at three points, and Christian writers have used all three. - General revelation. Christian theology has a name for what God makes known to everybody through the world itself, with no prophet and no book in the middle of it: general revelation, the sunrise and the ordered heavens saying something true about their maker to a farmer who has never heard of Moses. Paine’s claim that creation is a word God speaks to everyone, in no language and therefore in all of them, is not a rival to Christian teaching. It is Christian teaching, minus a clause. "The heavens declare the glory of God" (Psalm 19:1), and what may be known of God has been plain in the things that have been made ever since the creation of the world. "So they are without excuse" (Romans 1:20). The Christian addition is Hebrews 1:1-2: God spoke by the prophets, and last of all by his Son. - The content of religious duty. The creed of The Age of Reason asks for justice and mercy in almost the words of a prophet whose book Paine went on to attack (Micah 6:8). - The dignity of ordinary people. His refusal to let birth decide worth, his insistence that the poor are owed justice rather than alms, and his plain style itself were formed in a Quaker meeting house where a servant might speak and a magistrate keep silence. Some of the best things in Paine are Christian inheritance, held after the creed that produced them had been let go.

(†) Where the gospel parts company with him: testimony he would not weigh, a cross he read as bookkeeping, and a Bible he attacked without one at hand. + Paine asked to be answered rather than pitied, and the honest reply names four things. - Testimony. The hearsay argument (T4) proves far more than Paine wanted. Almost everything any of us knows about the past, about distant places, about our own birth, reaches us as the report of someone who was there. If a report from a witness cannot oblige belief, history is impossible and so is a court of law. Christian faith has never claimed to hand each believer a private revelation. It offers testimony to public events, and it says so openly: Luke writes to Theophilus from what "eyewitnesses and ministers of the word have delivered" (Luke 1:1-4), and Peter answers the charge of invention head on, "we did not follow cleverly devised myths when we made known to you the power and coming of our Lord Jesus Christ, but we were eyewitnesses of his majesty" (2 Peter 1:16). The question is whether these particular witnesses are credible, which is exactly the question Paine’s definition rules out before it can be asked. - The cross. Paine argued that redemption rests on a pecuniary idea, that is, an idea borrowed from money. A debt can be paid by a friend; a crime cannot be transferred to an innocent party without destroying justice itself. The objection has force against a picture in which an unwilling third party is seized to satisfy a creditor, and Christians should not defend that picture. What Scripture describes is not a third party at all. The judge bears the loss himself in the person of his Son, freely: "No one takes it from me, but I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:18). The one who suffers is the one who was wronged, and the motive is love rather than accountancy: "God shows his love for us in that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Romans 5:8; see also 2 Corinthians 5:21). - The method. Paine wrote Part I with no Bible or Testament to consult, as he cheerfully admits in the preface to Part II, and claimed that no believer with a library at his elbow could refute it. Watson took him up on it. A number of Paine’s sharpest charges turn out to depend on misquotation or on a passage he half remembered, and the errors were embarrassing enough that Paine got hold of a Bible and wrote Part II partly to repair them. The confidence outran the evidence, and that is a fault a reader is entitled to hold against a book that made evidence its whole demand. - Reading against himself. The argument that carried Common Sense was an argument from the authority of Scripture (T2). Eighteen years later he called the same chapters fable, and kept the conclusion. A man may of course change his mind about a book. What he cannot fairly do is go on leaning on a verdict he now says was delivered by a fabrication. None of this makes him a small man. He wrote for people nobody else was writing for, he was right that a faith which will not answer plain questions in plain words deserves the suspicion it gets, and the sight of him lying nearly forgotten in a Greenwich Village room, refused burial by the Friends whose meeting had formed him, is not a thing for any Christian to enjoy.