such a short space of time, notwithstanding the aid of printing,
which prevents the alteration of copies individually; what may not have
happened in a much greater length of time, when there was no printing,
and when any man who could write, could make a written copy, and call it
an original, by Matthew, Mark, Luke, or John."

Nothing appears to me more striking, as an illustration of the
far-reaching effects of traditional prejudice, than the errors into
which some of our ablest contemporary scholars have fallen by reason of
their not having studied Paine. Professor Huxley, for instance, speaking
of the freethinkers of the eighteenth century, admires the acuteness,
common sense, wit, and the broad humanity of the best of them, but says
"there is rarely much to be said for their work as an example of the
adequate treatment of a grave and difficult investigation," and that
they shared with their adversaries "to the full the fatal weakness of
a priori philosophizing." [NOTE: Science and Christian Tradition, p.
18 (Lon. ed., 1894).] Professor Huxley does not name Paine, evidently
because he knows nothing about him. Yet Paine represents the
turning-point of the historical freethinking movement; he renounced the
'a priori' method, refused to pronounce anything impossible outside
pure mathematics, rested everything on evidence, and really founded the
Huxleyan school. He plagiarized by anticipation many things from the
rationalistic leaders of our time, from Strauss and Baur (being the
first to expatiate on "Christian Mythology"), from Renan (being the
first to attempt recovery of the human Jesus), and notably from Huxley,
who has repeated Paine's arguments on the untrustworthiness of the
biblical manuscripts and canon, on the inconsistencies of the narratives
of Christ's resurrection, and various other points. None can be more
loyal to the memory of Huxley than the present writer, and it is even
because of my 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 t