always and forever, Paine himself persists in crowding out the
legitimate sequence of his adventures. No one can soberly write the
story of his life; one can, at best, only achieve a diatribe or an
apotheosis!

Said he:

"The sun needs no inscription to distinguish him from
darkness."

This quotation might almost serve as a text for the life of Paine,
might it not? And yet--there are people in the world who wear smoked
glasses, through which, I imagine, the sun himself looks not unlike a
muddy splash of yellow paint upon the heavens!

This is a book about Greenwich Village and not a defence of Thomas
Paine. Yet, since the reader has come with me thus far, I am going to
take advantage of his courteous attention for just another moment of
digression. Here is my promise: that it shall take up a small, small
space.

Small insects sting dangerously; and on occasion, a very trivial and
ill-considered word or phrase will cling closer and longer than a
serious or thoughtful judgment. When Theodore Roosevelt called Thomas
Paine "a filthy little Atheist" (or was the adjective "dirty"? I
really forget!) he was very young,--only twenty-eight,--and doubtless
had accepted his viewpoint of the great reformer-patriot from that
"hearsay upon hearsay" against which Paine himself has so urgently
warned us. Of course Mr. Roosevelt, who is both intellectual and
broad-minded, knows better than that today. But it is astonishing how
that ridiculous and unsuitable epithet--(a "trinity of lies" as one
historian has styled it)--has stuck to a memory which I am sure is
sacred to any angels who may be in heaven!

"Atheist" is a word which could be applied to few men less suitably
than to Paine. From first to last, he preached the goodness of God,
the power of God, the justice and mercy and infallibility of God; and
he lived in a profound trust in and love for God, and a hopeful and
courageous effort to carry out such principles of moral and national
right-doing as he believed to be the will of his beloved Creator.

"If this," as one indignant enthusiast exclaimed, "is to be an
Atheist, then Jesus Christ must have been an Atheist!"

As incongruous as anything else, in the judgment of Paine, is the fact
that he has, apparently, been adopted by the pacifists. The pacifists
and--Paine!--Paine who never in all his seventy years was out of a
scrap! They could scarcely have chosen a less singularly unfit guiding
star, for Paine was a