was only too surely confirmed by the treatment meted out to Paine. Few
stood by him; and the vigorous deistic movement set up in his latter
years by Elihu Palmer soon succumbed to the conditions, [1660] though
Palmer's book, The Principles of Nature (1802, rep. by Richard Carlile,
1819), is a powerful attack on the Judaic and Christian systems all
along the line. George Houston, leaving England after two years'
imprisonment for his translation of d'Holbach's Ecce Homo, went to
New York, where he edited the Minerva (1822), reprinted his book,
and started a freethought journal, The Correspondence. That, however,
lasted only eighteen months. All the while, such statesmen as Madison
and Monroe, the latter Paine's personal friend, seem to have been of
his way of thinking, [1661] though the evidence is scanty. Thus it came
about that, save for the liberal movement of the Hicksite Quakers,
[1662] the American deism of Paine's day was decorously transformed
into the later Unitarianism, the extremely rapid advance of which in
the next generation is the best proof of the commonness of private
unbelief. The influence of Priestley, who, persecuted at home, went to
end his days in the States, had doubtless much to do with the Unitarian
development there, as in England; but it seems certain that the whole
deistic movement, including the work of Paine and Palmer, had tended
to move out of orthodoxy many of those who now, recoiling from the
fierce hostility directed against the outspoken freethinkers, sought
a more rational form of creed than that of the orthodox churches. The
deistic tradition in a manner centred in the name of Jefferson, and the
known deism of that leader would do much to make fashionable a heresy
which combined his views with a decorous attitude to the Sacred Books.