around and threatened him with his thunder. ‘Ah, ha!’ says the
countryman, ‘now, Jupiter, I know that you are wrong; you are always
wrong when you appeal to your thunder.’ This is the case with me. I can
reason with the people of England, but I cannot fight against the
thunder of authority.”

Paine was found guilty and outlawed. He soon committed a new offence by
the publication of an anti-Christian work, The Age of Reason (1794 and
1796), which he began to write in the Paris prison into which he had
been thrown by Robespierre. This book is remarkable as the first
important English publication in which the Christian scheme of salvation
and the Bible are assailed in plain language without any disguise or
reserve. In the second place it was written in such a way as to reach
the masses. And, thirdly, while the criticisms on the Bible are in the
same vein as those of the earlier deists, Paine is the first to present
with force the incongruity of the Christian scheme with the conception
of the universe attained by astronomical science.

[171]

“Though it is not a direct article of the Christian system that this
world that we inhabit is the whole of the inhabitable globe, yet it is
so worked up therewith—from what is called the Mosaic account of the
creation, the story of Eve and the apple, and the counterpart of that
story, the death of the Son of God—that to believe otherwise (that is,
to believe that God created a plurality of worlds at least as numerous
as what we call stars) renders the Christian system of faith at once
little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the
air. The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he
who thinks that he believes both has thought but little of either.”