"My friends were falling as fast as the guillotine could cut their heads off, and as I expected, every day, the same fate, I resolved to begin my work. I appeared to myself to be on my death bed, for death was on every side of me, and I had no time to lose. This accounts for my writing at the time I did, and so nicely did the time and intention meet, that I had not finished the first part of the work more than six hours before I was arrested and taken to prison. The people of France were running headlong into atheism, and I had the work translated in their own language, to stop them in that career, and fix them to the first article of every man's creed, who has any creed at all--_I believe in God_."**
* It was a resumed task. Early in the year Paine had brought to his colleague Lanthenas a manuscript on religion, probably entitled "The Age of Reason." Lanthenas translated it, and had it printed in French, though no trace of its circulation appears. At that time Lanthenas may have apprehended blood about to be shed, the tribute to one that was pierced in trying to benefit mankind.
** Letter to Samuel Adams. The execution of the Girondins took place on October 31st.
The second Christmas of the new republican era dawns. Where is the vision that has led this wayworn pilgrim? Where the star he has followed so long, to find it hovering over the new birth of humanity? It may have been on that day that, amid the shades of his slain friends, he wrote, as with the proscription which fell on him, with the other Girondins, in May, and took the precaution to show Paine's essay to Couthon, who, with Robespierre, had religious matters particularly in charge. Couthon frowned on the work and on Paine, and reproached Lanthenas for translating it. There was no frown more formidable than that of Couthon, and the essay (printed only in French) seems to have been suppressed. At the close of the year Paine wrote the whole work _de novo_. The first edition in English, now before me, was printed in Paris, by Barrois, 1794. In his preface to Part II., Paine implies a previous draft in saying: "I had not finished it more than six hours, _in the state it has since appeared_, before a guard came," etc (The italics are mine.) The fact of the early translation appears in a letter of Lanthenas to Merlin de Thionville.