The Logos Scripture · The Book of Paine
The Book of Paine 3 · Written by himself, from Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and his letters
Thomas Paine, born at Thetford in England in 1737, died at New York in 1809. He made stays as a young man, later collected excise and kept a school. In 1774 he met Franklin in London and went to Philadelphia with his letter of introduction (cf. The Book of Franklin). In January 1776 he published Common Sense, arguing that the American colonies should separate from England; it sold enormously and he gave away everything due to him. That winter he wrote The American Crisis, the first number of which was read to the troops. In 1791 and 1792 he published Rights of Man; the English government charged him with seditious libel, convicted him in his absence, and he never returned. On the twenty-eighth of December 1793 the French imprisoned him in the Luxembourg, where he came near to being executed; he was released in November of the following year through the efforts of Monroe, the American minister. In 1794 and 1795 he published The Age of Reason, which cost him his standing entirely. He returned to America in 1802 to abuse in the newspapers, old acquaintances who no longer knew him, and in one place a refusal of his vote. He died in New York on the eighth of June 1809. Six people came to the burial: an Irish lawyer, the woman who had taken him in with her two sons, and two black men whose names nobody wrote down. He had asked to be buried in the Quakers ground and was refused; their stated reason was that people already accused their society of holding no creed, and that burying him would give the charge something to rest on. In 1819 Cobbett dug up the bones and carried them to England meaning to rebury them; the bones were afterwards lost and are unaccounted for still. This volume rests on what he wrote himself. On belief: he was not an atheist but a deist, and said of himself that he believed in one God and no more; The Age of Reason was written half against the church and half against the temper then abroad in France which held that nothing at all should be believed. The Order records this as he put it and does not tidy it. What matters is the same point: no argument of his closes on divine will, and he read the book everyone calls a god’s with the method one uses on any book. What this volume brings is not the reasoning — Hume is there before him (cf. The Book of Hume 2). What it brings is an act: carrying that reasoning to people who do not read philosophy, deliberately, in their own words, and paying for it with everything he had. The sentence in chapter one is where the Order takes the volume to come to rest: if a case can be understood by only twenty men, those twenty have decided for everybody. That is not a question of learning. It is a question of power.