Small insects sting dangerously; and on occasion, a very trivial and ill-considered word or phrase will cling closer and longer than a serious or thoughtful judgment.  When Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas Paine “a filthy little Atheist” (or was the adjective “dirty”?  I really forget!) he was very young,—­only twenty-eight,—­and doubtless had accepted his viewpoint of the great reformer-patriot from that “hearsay upon hearsay” against which Paine himself has so urgently warned us.  Of course Mr. Roosevelt, who is both intellectual and broad-minded, knows better than that today.  But it is astonishing how that ridiculous and unsuitable epithet—­(a “trinity of lies” as one historian has styled it)—­has stuck to a memory which I am sure is sacred to any angels who may be in heaven!

“Atheist” is a word which could be applied to few men less suitably than to Paine.  From first to last, he preached the goodness of God, the power of God, the justice and mercy and infallibility of God; and he lived in a profound trust in and love for God, and a hopeful and courageous effort to carry out such principles of moral and national right-doing as he believed to be the will of his beloved Creator.

“If this,” as one indignant enthusiast exclaimed, “is to be an Atheist, then Jesus Christ must have been an Atheist!”

As incongruous as anything else, in the judgment of Paine, is the fact that he has, apparently, been adopted by the pacifists.  The pacifists and—­Paine!—­Paine who never in all his seventy years was out of a scrap!  They could scarcely have chosen a less singularly unfit guiding star, for Paine was a confirmed fighter for anything and everything he held right.  And his militancy was not merely of action but of the soul, not only of policy or necessity but of spiritual conviction.  When even Washington was inclined to submit patiently a bit longer, it was Paine who lashed America into righteous war.  He fought for the freedom of the country, for the abolition of slavery, for the rights of women; he fought for old-age pensions, for free public schools, for the protection of dumb animals, for international copyright; for a hundred and one ideals of equity and humanity which today are legislature.  And he fought with his body and his brain; with his “flaming eloquence” and also with a gun!  Once let him perceive the cause to be a just one, and—­I know of no more magnificently belligerent a figure in all history.

And yet note here the splendid, the illuminating paradox:  Paine abhorred war.  Every truly great fighter has abhorred war, else he were not truly great.  In 1778, in the very thick of the Revolution, he wrote solemnly: 

“If there is a sin superior to every other, it is that of wilful and offensive war....  He who is the author of a war lets loose the whole contagion of hell, and opens a vein that bleeds a nation to death.” (A copy of this, together with the President’s recent message, might advantageously be sent to a certain well-known address on the other side of the world!) Yet did Paine, with this solemn horror of war, suggest that the United States stop fighting?  No more than he had suggested that they keep out of trouble in the first place.  Paine hated war in itself; but he held war a proper and righteous means to noble ends.