passage does not exaggerate the opinion of Paine's character
held by the good people of America. He was an object of horror
to them,--a rebel against government and against God,--a type of
Jacobinism, a type of Infidelity, and, with what seemed to them, no
doubt, a beautiful consistency, a type of all that was abandoned and
vile. Thomas Paine, a Massachusetts poet of _ci-devant_ celebrity,
petitioned the General Court for permission to call himself Robert Treat
Paine, on the ground that he had no Christian name. In New England,
Christianity and Federalism were looked upon as intimately connected,
and Democracy as a wicked thing, born of Tom Paine, Tom Jefferson, and
the Father of Lies. In this Trinity of Evil, Thomas Paine stood first.

During the struggle for the Presidency, Mr. Jefferson had been accused,
from every Federal stump, of the two unpardonable sins to Yankee
minds,--namely, that his notes could be bought for five shillings in the
pound, and that he did not believe in Revolution. Since his election, he
had been daily reminded of his religious short-comings by keen newspaper
attacks. He knew that he strengthened the hands of his enemies by
inviting home the Arch-Infidel. We are and were then a religious people,
in spite of the declaration in Mr. Adams's Tripolitan treaty that the
government of the United States was "not in any sense founded on the
Christian religion," and Paine could find few admirers in any class. Mr.
Jefferson, too, was well aware that the old man was broken, that the
fire had gone out of him, and that his presence in the United States
could be of no use whatever to the party. But he thought that Paine's
services in the Revolution had earned for him an asylum, and their old
acquaintance made him hasten to offer it. We think that the invitation
to Paine was one of the manliest acts of Jefferson's life.

When the matter became public, there arose a long, loud cry of abuse,
which rang from Massachusetts Bay to Washington City. Anarchy,
confusion, and the downfall of not only church, but state, were
declared to be the unavoidable consequences of Paine's return to our
shores,--that impious apostate! that Benedict Arnold, once useful, and
then a traitor! The "United States Gazette" had ten leaders on the text
of Tom Paine and Jefferson, "whose love of liberty was neither more
rational, generous, or social, than that of the wolf or the tiger." The
"New England Palladium" fairly shrieked:--"What! i