Soon after the appearance of Part First of the "Age of Reason" it was expurgated of its negative criticisms, probably by some English Unitarians, and published as a sermon, with text from Job xi., 7: "Canst thou by searching find out God? Canst thou find out the Almighty to perfection?" It was printed anonymously; and were its sixteen pages read in any orthodox church to-day it would be regarded as admirable. It might be criticised by left wings as somewhat old-fashioned in the warmth of its theism. It is fortunate that Paine's name was not appended to this doubtful use of his work, for it would have been a serious misrepresentation.*
* "A Lecture on the Existence and Attributes of the Deity, as Deduced from a Contemplation of His Works. M,DCC,XCV." The copy in my possession is inscribed with pen: "This was J. Joyce's copy, and noticed by him as Paine's work." Mr. Joyce was a Unitarian minister. It is probable that the suppression of Paine's name was in deference to his outlawry, and to the dread, by a sect whose legal position was precarious, of any suspicion of connection with "Painite" principles.
That his Religion of Humanity took the deistical form was an evolutionary necessity. English deism was not a religion, but at first a philosophy, and afterwards a scientific generalization. Its founder, as a philosophy, Herbert of Cherbury, had created the matrix in which was formed the Quaker religion of the "inner light," by which Paine's childhood was nurtured; its founder as a scientific theory of creation, Sir Isaac Newton, had determined the matrix in which all unorthodox systems should originate. The real issue was between a sanctified ancient science and a modern science. The utilitarian English race, always the stronghold of science, had established the freedom of the new deism, which thus became the mould into which all unorthodoxies ran. From the time of Newton, English and American thought and belief have steadily become Unitarian. The dualism of Jesus, the thousand years of faith which gave every soul its post in a great war between God and Satan, without which there would have been no church, has steadily receded before a monotheism which, under whatever verbal disguises, makes the deity author of all evil. English Deism prevailed only to be reconquered into alliance with a tribal god of antiquity, developed into the tutelar deity of Christendom. And this evolution involved the transformation of Jesus into Jehovah, deity of a "chosen" or "elect" people. It was impossible for an apostle of the international republic, of the human brotherhood, whose Father was degraded by any notion of favoritism to a race, or to a "first-born son," to accept a name in which foreign religions had been harried, and Christendom established on a throne of thinkers' skulls. The philosophical and scientific deism of Herbert and Newton had grown cold in Paine's time, but it was detached from all the internecine figure-heads called gods; it appealed to the reason of all mankind; and in that manger, amid the beasts, royal and revolutionary, was cradled anew the divine humanity.