Part 9

"What has become of the Bible that Paine attacked? So far as the mere paper and type is concerned it is still here. But so tar as belief is concerned, it is Paine's Bible that is believed in by the majority of educated Christians."

Rev. Dr. E. L. Rexford: "If Paine were now living he would be looked upon by all enlightened clergymen and laymen as a very conservative critic of the Christian religion."

Rev. George Burman Foster (Gottingen and Chicago Universities): "What was radical in regard to the Bible in his day would be conservative today."

Rev. S. Fletcher Williams (England): "His principles were right, and today an increasing number of religious teachers and religious minded men stand only where he stood a century ago."

Dr. T. A. Bland: "The principles of the 'Age of Reason' are embodied in sermons--orthodox and radical--all over the country."

John Maddock:--

"The work of Paine was done so well The Church is now the Infidel."

"He triumphed--Bibles are revised, Creeds change, and faiths decay, The facts his bitter foes despised Their children prize today." --C. Fannie Aliyn.

Rev. William Channing Gannett, D.D.: "What wonder Thomas Paine wrote his strong rank sarcasm! People should remember why he wrote it."

Moncure D. Conway, LL.D.: "It ['Age of Reason'] represents, as no elaborate treatise could, the agony and bloody sweat of a heart breaking in the presence of crucified Humanity. What dear heads, what noble hearts had that man seen laid low; what shrieks had he heard in the desolate homes of the Condorcets, the Brissots; what Canaanite and Midianite massacres had be seen before the altar of Brotherhood, erected by himself! And all because every human being had been taught from his cradle that there is something more sacred than humanity, and to which man should be sacrificed. Of all those massacred thinkers not one voice remains: they have gone silent: over their reeking guillotine sits the gloating Apollyon of Inhumanity. But here is one man, a prisoner, preparing for his long silence. He alone can speak for those slain between the throne and the altar. In these outbursts of laughter and tears, these outcries that think not of literary style, these appeals from surrounding chaos to the starry realm of order, from the tribune of vengeance to the sun shining for all, this passionate horror of cruelty in the powerful which will brave a heartless heaven or hell with its immortal indignation,--in all these the unfettered mind may hear the wail of enthralled Europe, sinking back choked with its blood, under the chain it tried to break. So long as a link remains of the same chain, binding reason or heart, Paine's 'Age of Reason' will live. It is not a mere book--it is a man's heart."

Edgar W. Howe: "The storm that arose over this book was never before equaled: it will never be equaled again."

Dr. Bond (A surgeon belonging to General O'Hara's staff): "Mr. Paine while hourly expecting to die, read to me parts of his 'Age of Reason'; and every night when I left him, to be separately locked up, and expected not to see him alive in the morning, he always expressed his firm belief in the principles of that book, and begged I would tell the world such were his dying opinions."

"The doctrines and sentiments which it contains may justly be regarded as the expressions of a dying man."--_D. M. Bennett._

"When it [first part] appeared he was a prisoner; his life in Couthon's hands. He had personally nothing to gain by its publication--neither wife, child, nor relative to reap benefit by its sale. It was published as purely for the good of mankind as any work ever written."--_Dr. Conway_.

"While in prison he composed the second part, and as he expected every day to be guillotined it was penned in the very presence of death."--_George W. Foote._

"Paine deserves whatever credit is due to absolute devotion to a creed believed by himself to be demonstrably true and beneficial. He showed undeniable courage, and is free from any suspicion of mercenary motives."--_Sir Leslie Stephen._

Thomas Nixon and Captain Daniel Pelton: "All you have heard of his recanting is false. Being aware that such reports would be raised after his death by fanatics who infested his house at the time it was expected he would die, we, intimate acquaintances of Thomas Paine, since the year 1776, went to his house--he was sitting up in a chair, and apparently in the full vigor and use of all his mental faculties. We interrogated him on his religious opinions, and if he had changed his mind or repented of anything he had said or written on that subject. He answered, 'Not at all.'"

Hon. Francis O. Smith, M. C.: "I have just parted with Hon. Richard M. Johnson, now a member of the House of Representatives [afterwards Vice-President of the United States], who told me that he visited Thomas Paine within the fortnight next preceding Paine's death; that he conversed with Paine and expressed a hope that he might recover; that Paine replied that he should shortly die, that he should never go out of his room again, and requested him to say to Mr. Jefferson that he had not changed his religious opinions in the slightest degree."

Walter Morton (with Paine when he died): "In his religious opinions he continued to the last as steadfast and tenacious as any sectarian to the definition of his own creed."

Dr. Philip Graves: "He [Amasa Woodsworth] told me that he nursed Thomas Paine in his last illness and closed his eyes when he was dead. I asked him if he recanted and called upon God to save him. He replied, 'No. He died as he had taught.'"

John Randel, Jr. (orthodox Christian): "The very worthy mechanic, Amasa Woodsworth, who saw Paine daily, told me there was no truth in such report."

Gilbert Vale, who interviewed Mr. Woodsworth, says: "As an act of kindness, Mr. Woodsworth visited Mr. Paine every day for six weeks before his death; he frequently sat up with him, and did so on the last two nights of his life.... Mr. Woodsworth assures us that he neither heard nor saw anything to justify the belief of any mental change in the opinions of Mr. Paine previous to his death."

The English writer, William Cobbett, a believer in Christianity, who lived for a time in this country, and who made a thorough investigation of the Paine calumnies, says: "Among other things said against this famous man is that he recanted before he died; and that in his last illness he discovered horrible fears of death.... It is a pure, unadulterated falsehood."

Cobbett, in 1819, announced his intention of publishing a biography of Paine. Soon after a pious fanatic of New York, named Collins, attempted to persuade him that Paine had recanted and begged him to state the fact in his book. He had induced a disreputable woman, Mary Hinsdale, an opium fiend, notorious for her lying propensities, to promise that she would tell Cobbett that she had visited Paine during his illness and that he had confessed to her his disbelief in the "Age of Reason" and expressed regret for having published it. Cobbett saw at once that the whole thing was a fraud. Collins, he says, "had a sodden face, a simper, and maneuvered his features precisely like the most perfidious wretch that I have known." However, he called on the woman. But her courage had forsaken her. Concerning the result of his visit he says: "She shuffled; she evaded; she equivocated; she warded off; she affected not to understand me." It was afterward proven that she had not conversed with Paine; that she had never seen him. But it did not need Cobbett's publication of the lie to secure its acceptance by the church. The occupant of nearly every orthodox pulpit was only too willing to publish it. This was the origin of the recantation calumny.

"Had Thomas Paine recanted, every citizen of New York would have heard of it within twenty-four hours. The news of it would have spread to the remotest confines of America and Europe as rapidly as the human agencies of that time could have transmitted it. It took ten years for this startling revelation to reach the ears of his sickbed attendants."--The Fathers of Our Republic.

Rev. Willet Hicks: "I was with him every day during the latter part of his sickness. He died as easy as any one I ever saw die, and I have seen many die."

"Paine died quietly and at peace."--_Ellery Sedgwick._

"He died placidly and almost without a struggle."--_Gilbert Vale._

"He spent the night in tranquility, and expired in the morning."--_Madame Bonneville._

Noble L. Prentiss: "Paine's death-bed terrors were used in the pulpit for a long time. It is probable that they never existed. It is living not dying, that troubles most of us. When the inevitable hour comes; when the lights are being put out, the shutters closed, the end is peace."

Concerning Paine's recanting Colonel Ingersoll says: "He died surrounded by those who hated and despised him,--who endeavored to wring from the lips of death a recantation. But, dying as he was, his soul stood erect to the last moment. Nothing like a recantation could be wrung from the brave lips of Thomas Paine."

Col. John Fellows: "It [the recantation story] was considered by the friends of Mr. Paine generally to be too contemptible to controvert."

"Thomas Paine did not recant. But the church is recanting. On her death-bed tenet after tenet of the absurd and cruel creed which Paine opposed is being renounced by her. Time will witness the renunciation of her last dogma and her death. Then will the vindication of Thomas Paine and the 'Age of Reason' be complete."--_The Fathers of Our Republic_.

PAINE'S PLACE IN LITERATURE.

Royal Tyler: "That head which worked such mickle woe to courts and kings."

Dr. Edmund Robinet: "A wise and lucid intellect."

James Thompson Callender: "He possesses both, talent and courage."

Walter Savage Landor:

"Few dared such homely truths to tell, Or wrote our English half so well."

Zells Encyclopedia: "He early distinguished himself by his literary abilities."

Cyclopedia of American Literature: "The merits of Paine's style as a prose writer are very great."

B. F. Underwood: "Thomas Paine's style as a writer, in some respects, has never been equaled. Every sentence that he wrote was suffused with the light of his own luminous mind, and stamped with his own intense individuality of character."

"There is a peculiar originality in his style of thought and expression, his diction is not vulgar or illiterate, but nervous, simple and scientific.... Paine, like the young Spartan warrior, went into the field stripped bare to the last thread of prudent conventional disguise; and thus not only fixed the gaze of men upon his intrepid singularity, but exhibited the vigor of his faculties in full play."--_Rev. George Croly_.

John Lendrum: "The style, manner, and language of the author is singular and fascinating."

"He was a magnificent writer of the English language."--_Henry Frank_.

"He is the best English writer we know."--_Gilbert Vale_.

"Ease, fluidity, grace, imagination, energy, earnestness, mark his style."--_Elbert Hubbard_.

"Paine is the first American writer who has a literary style, and we have not had so many since but that you may count them on the fingers of one hand."--_Ibid._

L. Carroll Judson: "His intellectual powers suddenly burst into a blaze of light."

John Horne Tooke: "You are like Jove coming down upon us in a shower of gold."

"The man who coined the intellectual gold of the Eighteenth Century was Thomas Paine."--_L. K. Washburn_.

Ebenezer Elliott: "Paine is the greatest master of metaphor I have ever read."

"He was not only master of metaphor, he was master of principles. He imparted life to great ideas."--_George Jacob Holyoake._

"The keenness of his intellect was matched by the brilliancy of his imagination. He stated a truth in a way that men could see, hear, and feel it. Take the following epigram: 'To argue with a man who has renounced the use of Reason is like administering medicine to the dead.'"--_George W. Foote_.

Prof. William Smyth: "Paine is a writer to be numbered with those few who are so supereminently fitted to address the great mass of mankind."

Dr. Charles Botta: "No writer, perhaps, ever possessed in a higher degree the art of moving and guiding the public at his will."

Elroy McKendree Avery: "No writer ever had a greater influence upon the events of his own time than he."

"He threw the charms of poetry over the statue of reason," says Stephen Simpson, "and made converts to liberty as if a power of fascination presided over his pen."

John Adolphus: "He took with great judgment, a correct aim at the feelings and prejudices of those whom he intended to influence."

Hezekiah Butterworth: "He had a surprising power of direct forcible argument."

William Hazlitt: "Paine affected to reduce things to first principles, to announce self-evident truths."

W. J. Fox, M. P.: "A keen and powerful intellect, and a philosophical mind going to the foundation of every question; bringing first principles forward in a luminous and impressive manner.

Robert James Mackintosh: "His strong coarse sense and bold dogmatism conveyed in an instinctively popular style made Paine a dangerous enemy always."

M. Gerard: "You know too well the prodigious effects produced by the writings of this celebrated personage."

Madame Roland: "The boldness of his conceptions, the originality of his style, the striking truths which he boldly throws out in the midst of those whom they offend, must necessarily have produced great effects."

Edward C. Reichwald: "He was an intellectual gladiator who won his victories upon the field of thought."

Boston Herald: "There is no better illustration in all history than exists in Paine's writings of Bulwer's aphorism, 'The pen is mightier than the sword.'"

Hon. John J. Lentz, M. C.: "The pen of the author of 'Common Sense' and the 'Crisis' did more to liberate the Colonies than did the sword of the commander in chief of the Colonial armies."

Prof. William Denton: "The pen of Paine accomplished more for American liberty than the sword of Washington."

General Lee of Revolutionary fame says: "The pen of Thomas Paine did more to achieve our Independence than did the sword of Washington." Joel Barlow, one of the most popular literary men of his time, a chaplain in the American Revolution and a fellow-worker of Paine for political liberty, both in England and France, says: "We may venture to say, without fear of contradiction, that the great American cause owed as much to the pen of Paine as to the sword of Washington." Even Paine's vilest calumniator, Cheetham, makes this admission: "His pen was an appendage to the army as necessary and as formidable as its cannon."

Reuben Post Halleck, L.L. D.: "Some have said that the pen of Thomas Paine was worth more to the cause of liberty than twenty thousand men. In the darkest hours he inspired the colonists with hope and enthusiasm... He had an almost Shakespearean intuition of what would appeal to the exigencies of each case."

"The real man back of the American Revolution was the man who had the ideas and not the man behind the guns.... Paine fought with the weapon of the future, and he was one of the very first that made it powerful. Paine's weapon was the pen, not the sword. Washington conquered small groups of men that had been living twenty or thirty years, but Thomas Paine conquered the prejudices of thousands of years."--_Herbert N. Casson._

Thomas Jefferson: "These two persons [Lord Bolingbroke and Thomas Paine] differed remarkably in the style of their writings, each leaving a model of what is most perfect in both extremes of the simple' and the sublime. No writer has exceeded Paine in ease and familiarity of style, in perspicuity of expression, happiness of elucidation, and in simple and unassuming language."

Abraham Lincoln: "I never tire of reading Paine."

Capel Lofft: "I am glad Paine is living: he cannot be even wrong without enlightening mankind, such is the vigor of his intellect, such the acuteness of his research, and such the force and vivid perspicuity of his expression."

Augustine Birrell, M. P.: "Paine was without knowing it, a born journalist. His capacity for writing on the spur of the moment was endless, and his delight in doing so was boundless."

Rev. Dr. Lyman Abbott: "He was perhaps the most popular pamphleteer of the country."

Library of The World's Best Literature: "The pamphlets of Thomas Paine were doubtless in their time 'half battles.' Clear, logical, homely, by turns warning, appealing, commanding, now sharply satirical, now humorous, now pathetic, always desperately in earnest, always written in admirably simple English, they constituted their author, in the judgment of many, the foremost pamphleteer of the eighteenth century."

Lord Brougham: "The most remarkable spirit in pamphlet literature was Thomas Paine.... His style was a model of terseness and force."

"This singular power of clear, vigorous exposition made him unequaled as a pamphleteer."--_Sir Leslie Stephen._

London Times (June 8, 1909): "Paine was the greatest of pamphleteers; more potent in influence on affairs than Swift, Beaumarchais, or Courier, more varied in his activity than any of them; his words influencing the actors in two of the chief political revolutions of the world and prime movers in a religious revolution scarcely less important."

"Perhaps someone, even in far off times, digging in the past, will come upon his books and will say, 'These were not words; they were events, in political history. This was a born leader who could make men march to victory or defeat.'"

Manchester Guardian (June 8, 1909): "He and his works became the great influence which set up everywhere constitutional societies and encouraged political and religious freedom of thought. He became the interpreter to England of the principles of the two Revolutions, and his words and ideas leavened speculations among the masses of the English people, and still leaven them today. We may forget him or remember him awry, but the very stuff of our brains is woven in the loom of his devising."

James K. Hosmer, LL. D.: "Few writers have exerted a more powerful influence since the world began, if the claim set forth at the time and never refuted be just, that his 'Common Sense' made possible the Declaration of Independence and therefore the United States of America."

Constitutional Gazette (Feb. 24, 1776): "The author introduces [in 'Common Sense'] a new system of polices as widely different from the old as the Copernican system is from the Ptolemaic. This extraordinary performance contains as surprising a discovery in politics as the works of Sir Isaac Newton do in philosophy."

"It would be difficult to name any human composition which has had an effect at once so instant, so extended and so lasting."--_Sir George Trevelyan._

Paul Louis Courrier (1824): "Never did any portly volume effect so much for the human race. Rallying all hearts and minds to the party of Independence, it decided the issue of that great conflict which, ended for America, is still proceeding all over the rest of the world."

"Incisive sentences,... as direct and vivid in their appeal as any sentences of Swift."--_Woodrow Wilson._

"Like a thunderbolt from the sky came Paine's magnificent argument for liberty... No pamphlet ever written sold in such vast numbers, nor did any ever before or since produce such marvelous results."--_Ella Wheeler Wilcox._

"Who could with almost one stroke of his pen, turn the people in a radically new direction? Who must exert an influence that had never, in any crisis of history, been exerted by one man before? The American Republic today, with its illimitable glory and belting a continent, can only reply: Thomas Paine!"--_Samuel P. Putnam._

"The soul of Thomas Paine went forth in that book. Every line of it glittered with the fires of his brain. It was written as a poet writes his song.... It was like the flowing of a fountain, the sweep of a wind, the rush of a comet."--Ibid.

The publication of Thomas Paine's immortal pamphlet, 'Common Sense,' will ever deserve to rank among the supremely important events of history. The farther we are removed from it in time the larger it will loom."--_Rev. Thomas B. Gregory._

"This work marks an era in the history of the world. Its interest will last longer than nations."--_Hon. Elizur Wright._

Universal Magazine (April, 1793. From a review of the "Rights of Man."): "And now courteous reader, we leave Mr. Paine entirely to thy mercy; what wilt thou say of him? Wilt thou address him? 'Thou art a troubler of privileged orders--we will tar and feather thee; nobles abhor thee, and kings think thee mad!' Or wilt thou put on thy spectacles, study Mr. Paine's physiognomy, purchase his print, hang it over thy chimney-piece, and, pointing to it, say: 'this is no common man!'"

"Those who know the book ['Rights of Man'] only by hearsay as the work of a furious incendiary would be surprised at the dignity, force and temperance of the style."--_Encyclopedia Britannica._

"The 'Rights of Man' is acknowledged to be the greatest work ever written for political freedom. This masterpiece gave free speech, and a free press to England and America."--_Ella Wheeler Wilcox._

"The thinking men of England now revere the memory of Thomas Paine for his great work in the nation's behalf. The most important of the many reforms England has undertaken in the century that has elapsed since it outlawed Paine have been brought about by Paine's masterly work."--_Elbert Hubbard_.

"The 'Rights of Man' will never die so long as men have rights."--_Alice Hubbard._

Richard Henry Lee: "It is a performance of which any man might be proud."

"The 'Rights of Man' will be more enduring than all the piles of marble and granite man can erect."--_Andrew Jackson_.

Dr. Frank Crane: "It deserves a place among the dozen epoch-making books of the race.... It is a milestone in human development that marks a point of progress that never can be retraced."

General Arthur O'Connor:

"I prize above all earthly things The 'Rights of Man' and Common Sense.'"

Prof. Edward McChesney Sait: "Many names which were famous in the revolutionary period of the eighteenth century are heard no more; but the name of Thomas Paine still lives. It will never die; those noble writings, 'Common Sense' and 'Rights of Man,' like the verses of the Roman poet, are more lasting than bronze."

Marie Joseph Chenier: "Notable epoch in the life of this philosopher who opposed the arms of 'Common Sense' to the sword of tyranny, 'the 'Rights of Man' to the machiavelism of English politicians; and who by two immortal works has deserved well of the human race."

Victor Robinson: "Another immortal work was being penned behind French prison-bars and the hand which held the pen was the hand of Thomas Paine."

"There shone on Paine's cell in the Luxembourg a great and imperishable vision, which multitudes are still following."--_Dr. Conway_.

M. M. Mangasarian: "In his dungeon his pen dropped light into the darkness of Europe and America by writing the 'Age of Reason.'"

"One of the most wonderful books ever written." _Edgar W. Howe_.

"The 'Age of Reason' defies the grave where other books of his generation sleep."--_George E. Macdonald._

"Not only the one great skeptical work of his time, but the only one which seems destined to live for all time."--_J. P. Bland_.

"Paine's 'Age of Reason' is a masterpiece of Rationalistic literature."--_William H. Maple_.

"It is a masterpiece in every particular--sound, logical and truthful."--_Sir Hiram Maxim_.

"There are the most varied graces of literary style, a profound and gentle philosophy, and a genuine love of humanity."--_William Heaford_.