“A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong, gives it a superficial appearance of being right,” argued Thomas Paine. But let common sense have its day in the fertile ground of free speech, let every man have access to the Holy Writ and freedom of religion, so that he might read and consider what generations past have not been permitted to read and consider, and the tide will turn. In America it did. One of the monumental tide turners was Thomas Paine. His weapons were reason, revelation, and an extraordinary literary gift. In January of 1776, Thomas Paine put...