To which Paine do you refer?
The Paine of 1776, who wrote passionately for colonial independence and liberty, and who eloquently buttressed his arguments with Scripture?
The Paine of 1793 whose Age Of Reason was nothing more than a merciless attack on that same Bible he had exalted in Common Sense?
What did Paine hope to conserve? Surely not his reputation, as he discovered when he returned to America from France to the universal condemnation by the same people who he had so inspired twenty years earlier as to be thought one of the prime movers of American Independence. In 1776 it can hardly be thought that Paine represented any great diversity of thought in the Americans. To the contrary he was a quintessential unifying American voice of the Revolution. It was his finest hour, and one he would never repeat.
Today, when we contemplate Common Sense, we admire how wonderfully Paine summed up the American Spirit of ‘76, and we forget how bitterly he subsequently betrayed that same Spirit. But the Americans of the Revolution never forgot, and never forgave.
What happened to bring about such a contrast between 1776 and 1793? In the final analysis, as many of his critics claimed, were Paine’s splendidly inspiring words of ’76 simply the empty rhetoric of a polemicist whose objectives had changed from unseating a tyrannical king to that of unseating corrupt bishops? Sadly, it seems likely the case.
The Thomas Paine of 1789.