A prominent figure during and after the War of the Revolution was Thomas Paine, or, as he was somewhat disrespectfully called, “Tom Paine.”  He was a dissenting minister who, conceiving himself ill-treated by the British government, came to Philadelphia in 1774 and threw himself heart and soul into the colonial cause.  His pamphlet, Common Sense, issued in 1776, began with the famous words, “These are the times that try men’s souls.”  This was followed by the Crisis, a series of political essays advocating independence and the establishment of a republic, published in periodical form, though at irregular intervals.  Paine’s rough and vigorous advocacy was of great service to the American patriots.  His writings were popular and his arguments were of a kind easily understood by plain people, addressing themselves to the common sense, the prejudices and passions of unlettered readers.  He afterward went to France and took an active part in the popular movement there, crossing swords with Burke in his Rights of Man, 1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution.  He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre July 27, 1794.  While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known work, the Age of Reason.  This appeared in two parts in 1794 and 1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was sent to prison.

The Age of Reason damaged Paine’s reputation in America, where the name of “Tom Paine” became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a synonym for atheism and blasphemy.  His book was denounced from a hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the sight of “the young,” whose religious beliefs it might undermine.  It was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument against Christianity.  What the cutting logic and persiflage—­the sourire hideux—­of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations.  Deism was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly deistic.  Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions, and was a part of the liberal movement of the age.  Paine was a man without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling.  He was no scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched.  In his examination of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities.  Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were instruments of oppression