sense of his grand leadership that he is here mentioned as
a typical instance of the extent to which the very elect of free-thought
may be unconsciously victimized by the phantasm with which they are
contending. He says that Butler overthrew freethinkers of the eighteenth
century type, but Paine was of the nineteenth century type; and it was
precisely because of his critical method that he excited more animosity
than his deistical predecessors. He compelled the apologists to defend
the biblical narratives in detail, and thus implicitly acknowledge
the tribunal of reason and knowledge to which they were summoned. The
ultimate answer by police was a confession of judgment. A hundred years
ago England was suppressing Paine's works, and many an honest Englishman
has gone to prison for printing and circulating his "Age of Reason."
The same views are now freely expressed; they are heard in the seats of
learning, and even in the Church Congress; but the suppression of Paine,
begun by bigotry and ignorance, is continued in the long indifference of
the representatives of our Age of Reason to their pioneer and founder.
It is a grievous loss to them and to their cause. It is impossible to
understand the religious history of England, and of America, without
studying the phases of their evolution represented in the writings
of Thomas Paine, in the controversies that grew out of them with such
practical accompaniments as the foundation of the Theophilanthropist
Church in Paris and New York, and of the great rationalist wing of
Quakerism in America.

Whatever may be the case with scholars in our time, those of Paine's
time took the "Age of Reason" very seriously indeed. Beginning with
the learned Dr. Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, a large number of
learned men replied to Paine's work, and it became a signal for the
commencement of those concessions, on the part of theology, which have
continued to our time; and indeed the so-called "Broad Church" is to
some extent an outcome of "The Age of Reason." It would too much enlarge
this Introduction to cite here the replies made to Paine (thirty-six are
catalogued in the British Museum), but it may be remarked that they
were notably free, as a rule, from the personalities that raged in
the pulpits. I must venture to quote one passage from his very learned
antagonist, the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield, B.A., "late Fellow of Jesus
College, Cambridge." Wakefield, who had resided in London during al