proposition than the case of Thomas Paine, the virtual founder of
modern democratic freethought in Great Britain and the States. [1653]
It does not appear that Paine openly professed any heresy while he
lived in England, or in America before the French Revolution. Yet
the first sentence of his Age of Reason, of which the first part was
written shortly before his imprisonment, under sentence of death from
the Robespierre Government, in Paris (1793), shows that he had long
held pronounced deistic opinions. [1654] They were probably matured
in the States, where, as we have seen, such views were often privately
held, though there, as Franklin is said to have jesuitically declared
in his old age, by way of encouraging immigration: "Atheism is unknown;
infidelity rare and secret, so that persons may live to a great age
in this country without having their piety shocked by meeting with
either an atheist or an infidel." Paine did an unequalled service
to the American Revolution by his Common Sense and his series of
pamphlets headed The Crisis: there is, in fact, little question that
but for the intense stimulus thus given by him at critical moments
the movement might have collapsed at an early stage. Yet he seems
to have had no thought there and then of avowing his deism. It was
in part for the express purpose of resisting the ever-strengthening
attack of atheism in France on deism itself that he undertook to save
it by repudiating the Judæo-Christian revelation; and it is not even
certain that he would have issued the Age of Reason when it did appear,
had he not supposed he was going to his death when put under arrest,
on which score he left the manuscript for publication. [1655]