ABSTRACT
To mention the names of Thomas Paine and Edmund Burke is to summon the category 'political thinker' to most minds. The listener or reader would not be wrong: but the response betrays an understanding that is far from complete. Ideas, like people, are rarely without relations. It happens frequently in the work of distinguished thinkers that a series of concepts spans a wide intellectual area in a congruent way. If God was conceived to have marked nature with His impress, artifice should be congruent with nature. Artifice took two characteristic forms, one human and the other divine. Paine provided a model for human conduct towards others in God's construction of nature. Burke and Paine display a natural theology, patterned respectively to defend and to criticise revelation. Paine and Burke returned different answers: and differed accordingly in their views of nature and politics. Thus conceptions of God's way provided the basis from which Burke assailed and Paine upheld the Revolution.
