ery child under fourteen in every necessitous family
will ensure the health and instruction of the next generation. It will
cost two millions and a half, but it will banish ignorance. He would pay
the costs of compulsory education. Pensions are to be granted not of
grace but of right, as an aid to the infirm after fifty years, and a
subsidy to the aged after sixty. Maternity benefit is anticipated in a
donation of twenty shillings to every poor mother at the birth of a
child. Casual labour is to be cared for in some sort of
workhouse-factories in London. These reforms are to be financed partly
by economies and partly by a graduated income-tax, for which Paine
presents an elaborate schedule. When the poor are happy and the jails
empty, then at last may a nation boast of its constitution. In this
pregnant chapter Paine not only sketched the work of the future; he
exploded his own premises.

The odium that still clings to Paine's theological writings comes mainly
from those who have not read them. When Mr. Roosevelt the other day
called him "a dirty little Atheist," he exposed nothing but his own
ignorance. Paine was a deist, and he wrote _The Age of Reason_ on the
threshold of a French prison, primarily to counteract the atheism which
he thought he saw at work among the Jacobins--an odd diagnosis, for
Robespierre was at least as ardent in his deism as Paine himself. He
believed in a God, Whose bounty he saw in nature; he taught the doctrine
of conditional immortality, and his quarrel with revealed religion was
chiefly that it set up for worship a God of cruelty and injustice. From
the stories of the Jewish massacres ordained by divine command, down to
the orthodox doctrine of the scheme of redemption, he saw nothing but a
history derogatory to the wisdom and goodness of the Almighty. To
believe the Old Testament we must unbelieve our faith in the moral
justice of God. It might "hurt the stubbornness of a priest" to destroy
this fiction, but it would tranquilise the consciences of millions. From
this starting-point he proceeds in the later second and third parts to a
detailed criticism designed to show that the books of the Bible were not
written by their reputed authors, that the miracles are incredible, that
the passages claimed as prophecy have been wrested from their contexts,
and that many inconsistencies are to be found in the narrative portions
of the Gospels.

Acute and fearless though it is, this detailed argumen