SOURCE: "Nature and Man's Democratic Calling," in Thomas Paine and the Religion of Nature, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993, pp. 38-56.

In the following chapter from his book, Fruchtman demonstrates that Paine's rationalist view of nature as product of God and reason at once shaped his belief that democracy was the only political form consistent with human nature and rights.

Human nature was one dimension of nature in Paine's ministry. Another was the physical world: the landscape and the heavens as God had created them. In the act of creation, God gave his people the trees, the sea, and the sky as well as human freedom and the rights of man. Human beings possessed freedom and rights as naturally as trees produced leaves or the ocean swelled into waves. The idea that human nature was directly joined to freedom and rights provided Paine with still another powerful argument to...