among humble people was alone prosecuted, diffused among the educated
an equally false notion that the "Age of Reason" was vulgar and
illiterate. The theologians, as we have seen, estimated more justly
the ability of their antagonist, the collaborator of Franklin,
Rittenhouse, and Clymer, on whom the University of Pennsylvania had
conferred the degree of Master of Arts, -- but the gentry confused
Paine with the class described by Burke as "the swinish multitude."
Skepticism, or its free utterance, was temporarily driven out of
polite circles by its complication with the out-lawed vindicator of
the "Rights of Man." But that long combat has now passed away. Time
has reduced the "Age of Reason" from a flag of popular radicalism to
a comparatively conservative treatise, so far as its negations are
concerned. An old friend tells me that in his youth he heard a sermon
in which the preacher declared that "Tom Paine was so wicked that he
could not be buried; his bones were thrown into a box which was
bandied about the world till it came to a button-manufacturer; and
now Paine is travelling round the world in the form of buttons!" This
variant of the Wandering Jew myth may now be regarded as unconscious
homage to the author whose metaphorical bones may be recognized in
buttons now fashionable, and some even found useful in holding
clerical vestments together.

But the careful reader will find in Paine's "Age of Reason" something
beyond negations, and in conclusion I will especially call attention
to the new departure in Theism indicated in a passage corresponding
to a famous aphorism of Kant, indicated by a note in Part II. The
discovery already mentioned, that Part I. was written at least
fourteen years before Part II., led me to compare the two; and it is
plain that while the earlier work is an amplification of Newtonian
Deism, based on the phenomena of planetary motion, the work of 1795