t has only an
historical interest to-day. When the violence of his persecutors had
goaded Paine into anger, he lost all sense of tact in controversy, and
lapsed occasionally into harsh vulgarities. But the anger was just, and
the zeal for mental honesty has had its reward. Paine had no sense for
the mystery and poetry of traditional religion. But what he attacked was
not presented to him as poetry. He was assailing a dogmatic orthodoxy
which had itself converted poetry into literal fact. As literal fact it
was incredible; and Paine, taking it all at the valuation of its own
professors, assailed it with a disbelief as prosaic as their belief, but
intellectually more honest. His interpretation of the Bible is
unscientific, if you will, but it is nearer to the truth of history than
the conventional belief of his day. If his polemics seem rough and
superfluous to us, it is only because his direct frontal attacks forced
on the work of Biblical criticism, and long ago compelled the
abandonment of most of the positions which he assailed. In spite of its
grave faults of taste and temper and manner, _The Age of Reason_
performed an indispensable service to honesty and morals. It was the
bravest thing he did, for it threatened his name with an immortality of
libel. His place in history is secure at last. The neglected pioneer of
one revolution, the honoured victim of another, brave to the point of
folly, and as humane as he was brave, no man in his generation preached
republican virtue in better English, nor lived it with a finer disregard
of self.

CHAPTER III

WILLIAM GODWIN AND THE REVOLUTION

Tom Paine is still reviled and still admired. The name of Mary
Wollstonecraft is honoured by the growing army of free women. Both may
be read in cheap editions. William Godwin, a more powerful intellect,
and in his day a greater influence than either, is now forgotten, or
remembered only because he was the father of Shelley's wife. Yet he
blazed in the last decade of the eighteenth century, as Hazlitt has told
us, "as a sun in the firmament of reputation." "No one was more talked
of, more looked up to, more sought after, and wherever liberty, truth,
justice was the theme, his name was not far off.... No work in our time
gave such a blow to the philosophical mind of the country as the
celebrated _Enquiry Concerning Political Justice_. Tom Paine was
considered for the time as a Tom Fool to him; Paley an old woman; Edmund
Burke