printing and circulating his "Age of Reason." The same views are now
freely expressed; they are heard in the seats of learning, and even
in the Church Congress; but the suppression of Paine, begun by
bigotry and ignorance, is continued in the long indifference of the
representatives of our Age of Reason to their pioneer and founder. It
is a grievous loss to them and to their cause. It is impossible to
understand the religious history of England, and of America, without
studying the phases of their evolution represented in the writings of
Thomas Paine, in the controversies that grew out of them with such
practical accompaniments as the foundation of the Theophilanthropist
Church in Paris and New York, and of the great rationalist wing of
Quakerism in America.

Whatever may be the case with scholars in our time, those of Paine's
time took the "Age of Reason" very seriously indeed. Beginning with
the learned Dr. Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff, a large number of
learned men replied to Paine's work, and it became a signal for the
commencement of those concessions, on the part of theology, which
have continued to our time; and indeed the so-called "Broad Church"
is to some extent an outcome of "The Age of Reason." It would too
much enlarge this Introduction to cite here the replies made to Paine
(thirty-six are catalogued in the British Museum), but it may be
remarked that they were notably free, as a rule, from the
personalities that raged in the pulpits. I must venture to quote one
passage from his very learned antagonist, the Rev. Gilbert Wakefield,
B.A., "late Fellow of Jesus College, Cambridge." Wakefield, who had
resided in London during all the Paine panic, and was well acquainted
with the slanders uttered against the author of "Rights of Man,"
indirectly brands them in answering Paine's argument that the
original and traditional unbelief of the Jews, among whom the alleged