ABSTRACT
Though its title is often appropriated to summarize the aspirations of the eighteenth century, The Age of Reason remains Paine’s most misunderstood and ill-fated work. 1 Written to combat atheistical tendencies in France, it has itself often been taken as a defence of unbelief. An American president, Theodore Roosevelt, notoriously once termed Paine a ‘filthy little atheist’ (he meant literally dirty, in light of Paine’s later reputation for self-neglect) in his life of Gouverneur Morris. In fact the text, as we will see, is a frank confession of deism, and especially the contention that God’s only revelation lay in nature, not the Bible. Largely ignored in France, where unsold stacks of it were reported to be gathering dust, The Age of Reason did enormous damage to Paine’s political reputation in Britain and America. 2 Eventually it became a foundation text of both the British and American secularist movements, but during the 1790s its impact was primarily negative, and it is difficult not to conclude that its publication, at least in English, was an imprudent move on Paine’s part.
