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 thus implicitly acknowledge the tribunal of reason and knowledge
to which they were summoned. The ultimate answer by police was a
confession of judgment. A hundred years ago England was suppressing
Paine's works, and many an honest Englishman has gone to prison for