practicable method (ten years before John Fitch made his discovery)
without publishing it. At any rate it appears to me certain that the
part of "The Age of Reason" connected with Paine's favorite science,
astronomy, was written before 1781, when Uranus was discovered.

Paine's theism, however invested with biblical and Christian
phraseology, was a birthright. It appears clear from several
allusions in "The Age of Reason" to the Quakers that in his early
life, or before the middle of the eighteenth century, the people so
called were substantially Deists. An interesting confirmation of
Paine's statements concerning them appears as I write in an account
sent by Count Leo Tolstoi to the London 'Times' of the Russian sect
called Dukhobortsy (The Times, October 23, 1895). This sect sprang up
in the last century, and the narrative says:

"The first seeds of the teaching called afterwards 'Dukhoborcheskaya'
were sown by a foreigner, a Quaker, who came to Russia. The
fundamental idea of his Quaker teaching was that in the soul of man
dwells God himself, and that He himself guides man by His inner word.
God lives in nature physically and in man's soul spiritually. To
Christ, as to an historical personage, the Dukhobortsy do not ascribe
great importance ... Christ was God's son, but only in the sense in
which we call, ourselves 'sons of God.' The purpose of Christ's
sufferings was no other than to show us an example of suffering for
truth. The Quakers who, in 1818, visited the Dukhobortsy, could not
agree with them upon these religious subjects; and when they heard
from them their opinion about Jesus Christ (that he was a man),
exclaimed 'Darkness!' From the Old and New Testaments,' they say, 'we
take only what is useful,' mostly the moral teaching. ... The moral
ideas of the Dukhobortsy are the following: -- All men are, by