Paine was found guilty and outlawed.  He soon committed a new offence by the publication of an anti-Christian work, The Age of Reason (1794 and 1796), which he began to write in the Paris prison into which he had been thrown by Robespierre.  This book is remarkable as the first important English publication in which the Christian scheme of salvation and the Bible are assailed in plain language without any disguise or reserve.  In the second place it was written in such a way as to reach the masses.  And, thirdly, while the criticisms on the Bible are in the same vein as those of the earlier deists, Paine is the first to present with force the incongruity of the Christian scheme with the conception of the universe attained by astronomical science.

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“Though it is not a direct article of the Christian system that this world that we inhabit is the whole of the inhabitable globe, yet it is so worked up therewith—­from what is called the Mosaic account of the creation, the story of Eve and the apple, and the counterpart of that story, the death of the Son of God—­that to believe otherwise (that is, to believe that God created a plurality of worlds at least as numerous as what we call stars) renders the Christian system of faith at once little and ridiculous, and scatters it in the mind like feathers in the air.  The two beliefs cannot be held together in the same mind; and he who thinks that he believes both has thought but little of either.”

As an ardent deist, who regarded nature as God’s revelation, Paine was able to press this argument with particular force.  Referring to some of the tales in the Old Testament, he says:  “When we contemplate the immensity of that Being who directs and governs the incomprehensible Whole, of which the utmost ken of human sight can discover but a part, we ought to feel shame at calling such paltry stories the Word of God.”

The book drew a reply from Bishop Watson, one of those admirable eighteenth-century divines, who admitted the right of private judgment and thought that argument

[172] should be met by argument and not by force.  His reply had the rather significant title, An Apology for the Bible.  George III remarked that he was not aware that any apology was needed for that book.  It is a weak defence, but is remarkable for the concessions which it makes to several of Paine’s criticisms of Scripture—­admissions which were calculated to damage the doctrine of the infallibility of the Bible.

It was doubtless in consequence of the enormous circulation of the Age of Reason that a Society for the Suppression of Vice decided to prosecute the publisher.  Unbelief was common among the ruling class, but the view was firmly held that religion was necessary for the populace and that any attempt to disseminate unbelief among the lower classes must be suppressed.  Religion was regarded as a valuable instrument to keep the poor in order.  It is notable that of the earlier rationalists (apart from the case of Woolston) the only one who was punished was Peter Annet, a schoolmaster, who tried to popularize freethought and was sentenced for diffusing “diabolical” opinions to the pillory and hard labour (1763).  Paine held that the people at large had the right of access to all new ideas, and he wrote so as to reach the people.  Hence his book must be suppressed.