without reverence, imagination, or religious feeling. He was no
scholar, and he was not troubled by any perception of the deeper and
subtler aspects of the questions which he touched. In his examination
of the Old and New Testaments he insisted that the Bible was an
imposition and a forgery, full of lies, absurdities, and obscenities.
Supernatural Christianity, with all its mysteries and miracles, was a
fraud practiced by priests upon the people, and churches were
instruments of oppression in the hands of tyrants. This way of
accounting for Christianity would not now be accepted by even the most
"advanced" thinkers. The contest between skepticism and revelation has
long since shifted to other grounds. Both the philosophy and the
temper of the _Age of Reason_ belong to the eighteenth century. But
Paine's downright pugnacious method of attack was effective with
shrewd, half-educated doubters; and in America well-thumbed copies of
his book passed from hand to hand in many a rural tavern or store,
where the village atheist wrestled in debate with the deacon or the
schoolmaster. Paine rested his argument against Christianity upon the
familiar grounds of the incredibility of miracles, the falsity of
prophecy, the cruelty or immorality of Moses and David and other Old
Testament worthies, the disagreement of the evangelists in their
gospels, etc. The spirit of his book and his competence as a critic
are illustrated by his saying of the New Testament: "Any person who
could tell a story of an apparition, or of a man's walking, could have
made such books, for the story is most wretchedly told. The sum total
of a parson's learning is _a-b_, _ab_, and _hic_, _hoec_, _hoc_, and
this is more than sufficient to have enabled them, had they lived at
the time, to have written all the books of the New Testament."

When we turn from the political and controversial writings of the
Revolution to such lighter literature as existed, we find little that