miracles were wrought, is an important evidence against them. The
learned divine writes:

"But the subject before us admits of further illustration from the
example of Mr. Paine himself. In this country, where his opposition
to the corruptions of government has raised him so many adversaries,
and such a swarm of unprincipled hirelings have exerted themselves in
blackening his character and in misrepresenting all the transactions
and incidents of his life, will it not be a most difficult, nay an
impossible task, for posterity, after a lapse of 1700 years, if such
a wreck of modern literature as that of the ancient, should
intervene, to identify the real circumstances, moral and civil, of
the man? And will a true historian, such as the Evangelists, be
credited at that future period against such a predominant
incredulity, without large and mighty accessions of collateral
attestation? And how transcendently extraordinary, I had almost said
miraculous, will it be estimated by candid and reasonable minds, that
a writer whose object was a melioration of condition to the common
people, and their deliverance from oppression, poverty, wretchedness,
to the numberless blessings of upright and equal government, should
be reviled, persecuted, and burned in effigy, with every circumstance
of insult and execration, by these very objects of his benevolent
intentions, in every corner of the kingdom?" After the execution of
Louis XVI., for whose life Paine pleaded so earnestly, -- while in
England he was denounced as an accomplice in the deed, -- he devoted
himself to the preparation of a Constitution, and also to gathering
up his religious compositions and adding to them. This manuscript I
suppose to have been prepared in what was variously known as White's
Hotel or Philadelphia House, in Paris, No. 7 Passage des Petits
Peres. This compilation of early and fresh manuscripts (if my theory