The Age of Reason - Thomas Paine (read aloud books TXT) 📗

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 Pères. This compilation of early and fresh manuscripts (if my theory be correct) was labelled, The Age of Reason, and given for translation to François Lanthenas in March 1793. It is entered, in Quérard (La France Litéraire) under the year 1793, but with the title “L’Age de la Raison” instead of that which it bore in 1794, “Le Siècle de la Raison.” The latter, printed “Au Bureau de l’imprimérie, rue du Théâtre-Français, No. 4,” is said to be by “Thomas Paine, Citoyen et cultivateur de l’Amérique septentrionale, secrétaire du Congrès du département des affaires étrangères pendant la guerre d’Amérique, et auteur des ouvrages intitules: La Sens Commun et Les Droits de L’Homme.”

When the Revolution was advancing to increasing terrors, Paine, unwilling to participate in the decrees of a Convention whose sole legal function was to frame a Constitution, retired to an old mansion and garden in the Faubourg St. Denis, No. 63. Mr. J. G. Alger, whose researches in personal details connected with the Revolution are original and useful, recently showed me in the National Archives at Paris, some papers connected with the trial of Georgeit, Paine’s landlord, by which it appears that the present No. 63 is not, as I had supposed, the house in which Paine resided. Mr. Alger accompanied me to the neighborhood, but we were not able to identify the house. The arrest of Georgeit is mentioned by Paine in his essay on “Forgetfulness” (Writings, III, 319). When his trial came on one of the charges was that he had kept in his house “Paine and other Englishmen,”⁠—Paine being then in prison⁠—but he (Georgeit) was acquitted of the paltry accusations brought against him by his Section, the “Faubourg du Nord.” This Section took in the whole east side of the Faubourg St. Denis, whereas the present No. 63 is on the west side. After Georgeit (or Georger) had been arrested, Paine was left alone in the large mansion (said by Rickman to have been once the hotel of Madame de Pompadour), and it would appear, by his account, that it was after the execution (October 31, 1793) Of his friends the Girondins, and political comrades, that he felt his end at hand, and set about his last literary bequest to the world⁠—The Age of Reason⁠—in the state in which it has since appeared, as he is careful to say. There was every probability, during the months in which he wrote (November and December 1793) that he would be executed. His religious testament was prepared with the blade of the guillotine suspended over him⁠—a fact which did not deter pious mythologists from portraying his deathbed remorse for having written the book.

In editing Part I of The Age of Reason, I follow closely the first edition, which was printed by Barrois in Paris from the manuscript, no doubt under the superintendence of Joel Barlow, to whom Paine, on his way to the Luxembourg, had confided it. Barlow was an American ex-clergyman, a speculator on whose career French archives cast an unfavorable light, and one cannot be certain that no liberties were taken with Paine’s proofs.

I may repeat here what I have stated in the outset of my editorial work on Paine that my rule is to correct obvious misprints, and also any punctuation which seems to render the sense less clear. And to that I will now add that in following Paine’s quotations from the Bible I have adopted the plan now generally used in place of his occasionally too extended writing out of book, chapter, and verse.

Paine was imprisoned in the Luxembourg on December 28, 1793, and released on November 4, 1794. His liberation was secured by his old friend, James Monroe (afterwards President), who had succeeded his (Paine’s) relentless enemy, Gouverneur Morris, as American Minister in Paris. He was found by Monroe more dead than alive from semi-starvation, cold, and an abscess contracted in prison, and taken to the Minister’s own residence. It was not supposed that he could survive, and he owed his life to the tender care of Mr. and Mrs. Monroe. It was while thus a prisoner in his room, with death still hovering over him, that Paine wrote Part Second of The Age of Reason.

The work was published in London by H. D. Symonds on October 25, 1795, and claimed to be “from the Author’s manuscript.” It is marked as “Entered at Stationers Hall,” and prefaced by an apologetic note of “The Bookseller to the Public,” whose commonplaces about avoiding both prejudice and partiality, and considering “both sides,” need not be quoted. While his volume was going through the press in Paris, Paine heard of the publication in London, which drew from him the following hurried note to a London publisher, no doubt Daniel Isaacs Eaton:

“Sir⁠—I have seen advertised in the London papers the second Edition [part] of The Age of Reason, printed, the advertisement says, from the Author’s Manuscript, and entered at Stationers Hall. I have never sent any manuscript to any person. It is therefore a forgery to say it is printed from the author’s manuscript; and I suppose is done to give the Publisher a pretence of Copy Right, which he has no title to.

“I send you