by a Society for the
Suppression of Vice (a device to, relieve the Crown) amounted to a libel
upon a morally clean book, restricting its perusal in families; and the
fact that the shilling book sold by and among humble people was alone
prosecuted, diffused among the educated an equally false notion that the
"Age of Reason" was vulgar and illiterate. The theologians, as we
have seen, estimated more justly the ability of their antagonist,
the collaborator of Franklin, Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the
University of Pennsylvania had conferred the degree of Master of
Arts,--but the gentry confused Paine with the class described by Burke
as "the swinish multitude." Skepticism, or its free utterance, was
temporarily driven out of polite circles by its complication with the
out-lawed vindicator of the "Rights of Man." But that long combat has
now passed away. Time has reduced the "Age of Reason" from a flag of
popular radicalism to a comparatively conservative treatise, so far as
its negations are concerned. An old friend tells me that in his youth
he heard a sermon in which the preacher declared that "Tom Paine was
so wicked that he could not be buried; his bones were thrown into a box
which was bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer;
and now Paine is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!"
This variant of the Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as
unconscious homage to the author whose metaphorical bones may be
recognized in buttons now fashionable, and some even found useful in
holding clerical vestments together.

But the careful reader will find in Paine's "Age of Reason" something
beyond negations, and in conclusion I will especially call attention to
the new departure in Theism indicated in a passage corresponding to a
famous aphorism of Kant, indicated by a note in Part II. The discovery
already mentioned, that Part I. was written at least fourteen years
before Part II., led me to compare the two; and it is plain that while
the earlier work is an amplification of Newtonian Deism, based on the
phenomena of planetary motion, the work of 1795 bases belief in God on
"the universal display of himself in the works of the creation and by
that repugnance we feel in ourselves to bad actions, and disposition
to do good ones." This exaltation of the moral nature of man to be the
foundation of theistic religion, though now familiar, was a hundred
years ago a new affirmation; it has led on a