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

of himself, from the beginning of the world to this day. It was this by which the first notice of him was revealed to the inhabitants of the earth, and by which alone it has been kept up ever since among the several nations of it. From this the reason of man was enabled to trace out his nature and attributes, and, by a gradual deduction of consequences, to learn his own nature also, with all the duties belonging to it which relate either to God or to his fellow-creatures. This constitution of things was ordained by God as an universal law or rule of conduct to man⁠—the source of all his knowledge⁠—the test of all truth, by which all subsequent revelations which, are supposed to have been given by God in any other manner must be tried, and cannot be received as divine any further than as they are found to tally and coincide with this original standard.

“It was this divine law which I referred to in the passage above recited (meaning the passage on which they had attacked him), being desirous to excite the reader’s attention to it, as it would enable him to judge more freely of the argument I was handling. For by contemplating this law, he would discover the genuine way which God himself has marked out to us for the acquisition of true knowledge: not from the authority or reports of our fellow-creatures, but from the information of the facts and material objects which, in his providential distribution of worldly things, he hath presented to the perpetual observation of our senses. For as it was from these that his existence and nature, the most important articles of all knowledge, were first discovered to man, so that grand discovery furnished new light towards tracing out the rest, and made all the inferior subjects of human knowledge more easily discoverable to us by the same method.

“I had another view likewise in the same passages, and applicable to the same end, of giving the reader a more enlarged notion on the question in dispute, who, by turning his thoughts, to reflect on the works of the Creator, as they are manifested to us in this fabric of the world, could not fail to observe, that they are all of them great, noble, and suitable to the majesty of his nature, carrying with them the proofs of their origin, and showing themselves to be the production of an all-wise and almighty Being; and by accustoming his mind to these sublime reflections, he will be prepared to determine whether those miraculous interpositions so confidently affirmed to us by the primitive Fathers can reasonably be thought to make a part in the grand scheme of the divine administration, or whether it be agreeable that God, who created all things by his will, and can give what turn to them he pleases by the same will, should, for the particular purposes of his government and the services of the Church, descend to the expedient of visions and revelations, granted sometimes to boys for the instruction of the elders, and sometimes to women to settle the fashion and length of their veils, and sometimes to pastors of the Church to enjoin them to ordain one man a lecturer, another a priest; or that he should scatter a profusion of miracles around the stake of a martyr, yet all of them vain and insignificant, and without any sensible effect, either of preserving the life, or easing the sufferings of the saint; or even of mortifying his persecutors who were always left to enjoy the full triumph of their cruelty, and the poor martyr to expire in a miserable death. When these things, I say, are brought to the original test, and compared with the genuine and indisputable works of the Creator, how minute, how trifling, how contemptible must they be! and how incredible must it be thought, that for the instruction of his church God should employ ministers so precarious and unsatisfactory and inadequate, as the ecstacies of women and boys, and the visions of interested priests, which were derided at the very time by men of sense to whom they were proposed!

“That this universal law (continues Middleton, meaning the law revealed in the works of the Creation) was actually revealed to the heathen world long before the gospel was known, we learn from all the principal sages of antiquity, who made it the capital subject of their studies and writings.

“Cicero (says Middleton) has given us a short abstract of it in a fragment still remaining from one of his books on government, which (says Middleton) I shall here transcribe in his own words, as they will illustrate my sense also in the passages that appear so dark and dangerous to my antagonist.

“ ‘The true law (it is Cicero who speaks) is right reason conformable to the nature of things, constant, eternal, diffused through all, which calls us to duty by commanding, deters us from sin by forbidding; which never loses its influence with the good, nor ever preserves it with the wicked. This law cannot be overruled by any other, nor abrogated in whole or in part; nor can we be absolved from it either by the senate or by the people, nor are we to seek any other comment or interpreter of it but itself; nor can there be one law at Rome, and another at Athens⁠—one now and another hereafter; but the same eternal immutable law comprehends all nations, at all times, under one common master and governor of all⁠—God. He is the inventor, propounder, enactor of this law; and whoever will not obey it must first renounce himself and throw off the nature of man; by doing which he will suffer the greatest punishments, though he should escape all the other torments which are commonly believed to be prepared for the wicked.’ Here ends the quotation from Cicero.

“Our doctors (continues Middleton) perhaps will look on this as rank deism: but,