on of the deeper
and subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his
examination of the Old and New Testaments, he insisted that the Bible
was an imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and
obscenities. Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and
miracles, was a fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and
churches were instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This
way of accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even
the most "advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and
revelation has long since shifted to other grounds. Both the
philosophy and the temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the
eighteenth century. But Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack
was effective with shrewd, half-educated doubters, and in America
well-thumbed copies of his book passed from hand to hand in many a
rural tavern or store, where the village atheist wrestled in debate
with the deacon or the school-master. Paine rested his argument
against Christianity upon the familiar grounds of the incredibility of
miracles, the falsity of prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses
and David and other Old Testament worthies, the disagreement of the
evangelists in their gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his
competence as a critic are illustrated by his saying of the New
Testament: "Any person who could tell a story of an apparition, or of a
man's walking, could have made such books, for the story is most
wretchedly told. {380} The sum total of a parson's learning is a b,
ab, and hic, haec, hoc, and this is more than sufficient to have
enabled them, had they lived at the time, to have written all the books
of the New Testament."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the
Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that
would deserve mention in a more crowded period. The few things in this
kind that have kept afloat on the current of time--_rari nantes in
gurgite vasto_--attract attention rather by reason of their fewness
than of any special excellence that they have. During the eighteenth
century American literature continued to accommodate itself to changes
of caste in the old country. The so-called classical or Augustan
writers of the reign of Queen Anne replaced other models of style: the
_Spectator_ set the fashion of almost all of our lighter prose, from
Franklin's _Busybody_ down to the time of Irving, w