1791-92, written in defense of the French Revolution.
He was one of the two foreigners who sat in the Convention; but falling
under suspicion during the days of the Terror, he was committed to the
prison of the Luxembourg and only released upon the fall of Robespierre
July 27, 1794. While in prison he wrote a portion of his best-known
work, the _Age of Reason_. This appeared in two parts in 1794 and
1795, the manuscript of the first part having been intrusted to Joel
Barlow, the American poet, who happened to be in Paris when Paine was
sent to prison.

The _Age of Reason_ damaged Paine's reputation in America, where the
name of "Tom Paine" became a stench in the nostrils of the godly and a
synonym for atheism and blasphemy. His book was denounced from a
hundred pulpits, and copies of it were carefully locked away from the
sight of "the young," whose religious beliefs it might undermine. It
was, in effect, a crude and popular statement of the deistic argument
against Christianity. What the cutting logic and persiflage--the
_sourire hideux_--of Voltaire had done in France, Paine, with coarser
materials, essayed to do for the English-speaking populations. Deism
was in the air of the time; Franklin, Jefferson, Ethan Allen, Joel
Barlow, and other prominent Americans were openly or unavowedly
deistic. Free thought, somehow, went along with democratic opinions,
and was a part of the liberal movement of the age. Paine was a man
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 sto