By Robert W. Morrell

IT DOES NOT fall to the lot of many authors to produce a work which 175 years after the date of publication remains a source of inspiration and controversy. Thomas Paine’s book, The Age of Reason, is one of the select few coming into that category. 

The Age of Reason is without doubt one of the truly great deistical works in the English language. Though by no means the first such work, it certainly became the most influential and widely read of such books. The controversy aroused was carried on with impassioned intensity, an intensity *hick makes it almost impossible outside the pages of a large volume to give an adequate description. 

Paine directed his words towards the awakening working class, not only of Britain but of all countries. He wrote with a clarity of mean- ing and a simplicity of language that made his words go home to his readership Nith a force few other works have managed. This, in the eyes of established authority, was the greatest danger they presented. The workers of the 18th, century formed a class which hardly merits the description litera.,;e. Many of those able to read were in some form of mental blinkers as they were strongly influenced by the prejudices of low church evangelism on one hand and methodism or other forms of religious dissent on the other. The character of the class is all too well illustrated by the actions of the “Church and King” mob responsible for burning the home and library of the Unitarian Priestley. 

Yet when all is said about the generally hostile climate of opinion among workers towards unorthodox views, it remains evident that there existed a growing group among them who saw in Paine’s work ideas which accurately reflected their own opinions. His criticism of institutionalised religion must have struck deep into the minds of many religious dissenters, for by no means all dissent was strictly theological and lacked political Motivation. The followers of Alexander Kilham, who broke away from Methodism to form the Methodist . New Connexion in 1797, certainly appear to have been influenced by him for there are frequent references to them in association with Paine’s name. In Huddersfield they were called ‘Tom Paine Methodists’, while a chapel in Halifax they formed a reading and debating club where Paine’s works were among those discussed. The official methodist Conference, in explanation of the Kilham secession to their Church in Ireland, stated: “We shall lose all the turbulent disturbers of our Zion….all who have embraced the sentiments of Paine…” (E.P. Thompson. The Making of the English Working Class (1968), pp.48-49.)

It was not Paine’s intention to publish his views on religion until old age, but, as he tells us in The Age of Reason, a situation arose which rendered “a work of this kind exceedingly necessary.” The ruling oligarchy in Britain thought otherwise. Whatever the sceptical attitudes towards religion on the part of many members of the aristocracy, the impact of the French Revolution had closed their ranks in fear of the growing working class emulating their fellows in France. A campaign had been instituted to rid Britain of all but views favourable in religion as in politics to the status quo. The warring actions among the oligarchy who, as M.W. Wiseman (J.M. Robertson) wrote, “a few years before had been scandalising the pious by their Deism and disrespect to the reigning creed”, were hastily converted to the conviction that orthodoxy must be maintained among the working masses. (The Dynamics of Religion (1897), p.197.) As religion was considered very much a part of the structure of government in the 18th. century, the unholy alliance between reverent and irreverent sections of the aristocracy posed no real problems. The important thing was to ensure that religion continued to inculcate in the minds of working people an abject resignation to their lot in life, and a humble acceptance of the unquestioned right of their “betters” to lord it over them. As the Duchess of Buckingham expressed it concerning some flickerings of the notion of spiritual equality on the part of religious dissenters: “It is monstrous to be told that you have a heart as sinful as the common wretches that crawl on the earth.” (J.H. Whiteley. Wesley’s England (1938), p.328.)

The Christian religion is strictly an authoritarian system; it faithfully mirrors the nature of society as existing during its formative years. When adopted by the secular Roman authorities it gave by way of reward the claim that they derived their powers directly from God, and consequently they were beyond challenge from mere mortal men. Paine struck at the roots of this by bluntly denying the right so claimed, and asserting the equality of men. He stated that all churches (including the non—Christian variety) had been established to enslave mankind and monopolize power and profit. Paine developed his Mittme with a two pronged attack against the fundamental tenets on which the theory of divine authority was erected, revelation and the historicity of biblical stories. Of the two the most important is the former, as much of the latter is in fact an attempt to validate revelation. 

Paine did not deny revelation, as a believer in a god he had to admit its possibility. However, he did make against it the simple, but devastatingly destructive point that revelation was only such to the recipient, to all others it was hearsay. “To put faith in it is not to put faith in God but in the man”, Paine writes, “from whom the account comes; and that man may have been deceived, or he may have dreamed it, or he may be an impostor and may lie’. There is no possible criterion whereby to judge the truth of what he tells, for even the morality of it would be no proof of revelation.” 

The force of Paine’s argument was not lost upon his opponents, for to destroy revelation you destroy along with it the authority of the Church and that with which it vests others. The whole structure of Christianity, as Karl Barth shows, rests on revelation. 

The destruction of church authority achieved by Paine, reduced Christianity to the level of but a philosophy and nothing more. This is the theoretical position of many leading theologians of the present day; aware cf the impossibility of demonstrating the historicity of the New Testament stories they have adopted a policy of demythology, a process which some Christian observers see as not only throwing out the baby with the bathwater but the bath as well. The end product of all this is to make Christianity representative of an attitude towards life and the world, as against its original dogmatic authoritarianism. 

Here we arrive at two significant contributions Paine – introduced into theological debate, and which gave The Age of Reason a lasting significance; first, the. appeal to science; second, the democratic spirit displayed. Throughout The Age of Reason there are frequent references and appeals to science, particularly astronomy, to get points across. Science in Paine’s day was seen in terms of its being compatible with holy writ; Paine adopted a position completely at variance with this and his use of science becomes a radical departure from the general attitude prevalent at that period in time. It is well to rem2mber•that specific biblical claims were looked on as established scientific facts, thus the age of the earth was computed from the Bible and the generally accepted date arrived at incorporated as late as 1701 into the margins of Bishop William Lloyd’s edition of the Bible, there to remain uncontested for almost two centuries. 

Likewise with geology. The advance of geological knowledge was greatly retarded by, among other the notion of a universal deluge derived from the Bible. (W.L. Edwards, The Early History of Palaeontoloa (1967), p.11.) The bitter controversies of the early 19th century between the catastrophists (who held that in geological history there had been a number of successive epochs — of which the latest was than of Noah — during which there were major upheavals leading the destruction of all life and after an interval the world was restocked with a new assemblage of animal and plant life) and the uniformitarians (who held that the world as we see it is the product of steady, slow processes), the former being represented by a number of clerical geologists such as Buckland (Buckland later modified his position, though not as fully as

L.K. Clark maintains in his Pioneers of Prehista and (1961), pp.90-91.), Sedgwick and Conybeare, while the latter were led by Lyell (Lyell was a strong supporter of South Place Ethical Chapel when it was under the leadership of Dr. Moncure Conway, author of the best

study of Paine’s life yet published. See S.K. Ratcliffe,The Storm of South Place (1955), pp.44-45. Geikie on the other hand never seems to have grown out of his father’s somewhat dull nonconformist views, his father having been an official of the Argyle Square Chapel, Edinburgh. See Life of W. Lindsay Alexander by J. Ross (1887) a.195.), Geike, and Scrope. Well has Zittel commented on geology in Britain when he wrote: “…there more than in any other country, theological doctrines always effected geological conceptions.” (Quoted by J.W. Judd in his book The Coming of Evolution (1910) p.31.) It was in such an atmosphere that Paine used science against religion, a truly revolutionary step. 

The frantic efforts to make science conform to scripture failed and it was Paine’s approach which eventually won out, though many years after his death. His approach was reflected in the steady increase and influence of biblical and social criticism. Theologians were forced to take cognizance of the abyss between traditional theology and what modern had to accept from their scientific and other enquiries, and realise that it could not be bridged by trickery or pretending no such differences existed. Thus they were forced back on the defensive. The triumph of science owes no small credit to the work of Paine, it owes him a debt of gratitude as yet largely unrepayed. 

Paine, as we have seen, saw all men as equals. His concept of society was one run along co-operative lines. He rejected without qualification a state patterned along New Testament lines in which each individual had his or her divinely appointed place, and which looked for a post mortem solution to human problems. The Duchess of Buckingham, who we have already quoted, might speak of the working class becoming “tinctured with impertinence and disrespect towards their Superiors”, or the hymn writer sing of:

“A rich man in his castle, the poor man at his gate, 

“God made them high and lowly, and ordered their estate.” 

But the class on which they looked down was waking up, and under the influence of Paine’s great works was rejecting a concept of society which relegated the great mass of people to the status of animals to be used only to enable a small group to live in the lap of luxury. 

Paine appealed to reason, his ultimate cause was a democratic system of society. His spirit stands in glaring contrast to that of the politico-religious dictators who lorded it over most nations when he wrote, and who have their counterparts today in dictators such as Franco, who destroyed the liberties of the Spanish people, and the latter-day Al Capones who sit astride the banks of the Greek people.

The Age of Reason was influential because it made its case out in an easy to understand manner, if you like a journalistic style. It struck at authoritarian religion but it was not an anti-religious work. The only authority Paine accepted was that of reason, thus in the last analysis each and every individual had to arrive at his own distinctive religious philosophy by his own efforts. The Age of Reason is fundamentally a democratic treatise, therein lies its strength, likewise its relevance for today. Paine spoke out in the interests of ordinary men and women against a politico-religious ruling class; the response was initially slow but gained momentum. Paine’s words had a quality of sincerity that moved men deeply. They inspired men to action; they still retain that quality.