The Age of Reason by Thomas Paine. First published: Part 1 in 1794, Part 2 in 1795, London and Paris.
The Age of Reason, written in Paris in 1793 and published in both French and English and in both countries in 1794, is perhaps the most controversial of Paine’s three 18th-century best sellers. Paine wrote The Age of Reason to save the French people from atheism after the French Revolution, ‘lest in the general wreck of superstition … and false theology, we lose sight of morality, of humanity and of the theology that is true.’ Paine says at the beginning of the book that he had intended for several years past, to publish my thoughts on religion. He ‘intended it to be the last offering I should make to my fellow citizens of all nations.’ In 1793 as Paine wrote to Samuel Adams: ‘My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off and as I expected every day the same fate I resolved to begin my work.’ Paine was allowed to deliver Part 1 of the book to his publisher, Joel Barlow, as he was being taken to the Luxembourg Prison after his arrest on 28th December 1793. Paine was lucky to escape execution himself. Part 1 is overall a positive and generous work, a statement of Paine’s own faith: ‘I believe in one God and no more; and I hope for happiness beyond this life. I believe in the equality of man, and I believe that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and endeavouring to make our fellow creatures happy.’ He writes: ‘All national institutions of Churches, whether Jewish, Christian or Turkish appear to me no other than human inventions set up to terrify and enslave mankind, and monopolise power and profit.’ He rejected Christianity as an insult to God. ‘They represent this virtuous and amiable man, Jesus Christ, to be at once both God and man, and also the Son of God – celestially begotten on purpose to be sacrificed, because they say that Eve, in her longing had eaten an apple.’ In Paine’s opinion: ‘It is impossible to conceive a story more derogatory to the Almighty.’ People should look for revelation and the word of God, not to the Bible, but to ‘the Creation we behold; and it is in this word, which no human invention can counterfeit or alter, that God speaketh universally to man’.
Part 1 concludes
that ‘if ever a universal religion should prevail it will not be in believing anything new, but in getting rid of redundancies and believing as man first believed.’ That is in one God. ‘In the meantime let every man follow… the religion and the worship he prefers.’ Part 2, written after his release from prison, offers a more detailed examination of the Bible. Paine did not have access to a Bible when he wrote Part 1. On further examination he is not impressed: ‘I can say also that I have found them much worse books than I had conceived.’ Some of the criticism is savage. He was writing before modern biblical scholarship. He takes the text at face value. His criticism is naïve and based largely on moral values. While it is unsophisticated, it is still powerful and perhaps reminds us that there is a great deal in the ‘Good Book’ that we should find profoundly shocking. To give just one example, Numbers Chapter 31 verse 13: ‘The Jewish Army has returned from one of their plundering and murdering excursions’ and Moses is angry with them because they have saved all the women alive. He instructs them: “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known a man by lying with him; but all the women-children that have not known a man by lying with him keep alive for yourselves.” This is, as Paine says, ‘an order to butcher the boys, to massacre the mothers and debauch the daughters.’ It should also be remembered that in Part 2 Paine was answering criticism of the far gentler Part 1 that was both personal and vicious. The Age of Reason is still worth reading for its clarity and vigour and in Part 1 for its generosity and its vivid evocation of the beauty and bounty of the world in which we live. In some circles it is still considered a very dangerous book.
Barbara Burfoot is a retired Humanist celebrant who joined the SOF Network in 2002 and served six years as a Trustee before retiring in 2015.