THE CLOSING SCENE.

CHAP. I.

An avowed Enfidel.

THOMAS PAINE.

"It is no fanciful conjecture that an active Infidel may be doing harm even in his grave. The poison of his principles may be infecting the young and the thoughtless, long after he has ceased upon this earth to live, and move, and have his being."-DR. CHALMERS.

IN one of the stirring speeches of Sir Robert Inglis, the animated inquiry occurs: —

"I appeal to the sagacity with which you regard all questions of commercial policy, and I ask you whether the labours of the missionaries do not open to you new sources of speculation and enterprise, which flow back upon us with increased wealth? Wherever

B

a missionary settles, the spot becomes the centre of civilisation, and wherever civilisation is established it becomes the centre of commerce. What was it that civilised man but Christianity? Can infidelity point out the green spot that it has won from the wilderness?"

The query so ably put recurs to one again and again in pursuing the successful, but pestilential, career of the great Apostle of Infidelity-Thomas Paine.

Paine was born in 1737, at Thetford in Norfolk. His father was a Quaker. His education seems to have been limited to a smattering of Latin, some knowledge of arithmetic, and a slight insight into mathematics. At first he followed his father's business, that of a stay-maker; subsequently became an exciseman at Lewes; but was dismissed for keeping a tobacconist's shop, an arrangement clearly incompatible with his duties as a revenue officer. He first attracted attention by a smart pamphlet, advocating the propriety of advancing the salaries of excisemen: became known

to Dr. Franklin, then in London: and was advised by the Doctor to emigrate to America. The advice was taken, and in 1774 we find Paine in Pennsylvania, editing with vigour and success "The Pennsylvania Magazine." The commencement of hostilities between the mother country and the colonies suggested his clever, but malignant, pamphlet "Common Sense," in which he counselled immediate separation from Britain. For this brochure he was rewarded with a grant of 5007. from the Legislature of Pennsylvania, and the appointment of Clerk to the Committee for Foreign Affairs. This latter confidential situation he was obliged to resign in 1779, in consequence of his having divulged some official secrets. The following year he was appointed Clerk to the Assembly of Pennsylvania, and in 1785, though deprived of the object of his ambition, that of historiographer to the United States (the motion to appoint him such being, by a large majority, rejected), he was benefited by large pecuniary douceurs from the infant republic: congress

voting him a donation of 3000 dollars, and the State of New York awarding him 500 acres of land. In 1787 he embarked for France, and, after visiting Paris, came to England. There his speculations, relative to an iron bridge of his own invention, involved him in pecuniary difficulties. He was arrested for debt, but bailed by some American merchants. On the appearance of Burke's "Reflections on the French Revolution," he wrote, by way of reply, the first part of his notorious work "The Rights of Man." The second part was published early in 1792. On the 21st of May in the same year a proclamation was issued against wicked and seditious publications, alluding to, but not naming, "The Rights of Man." On the same day, May 21st, a prosecution was commenced against Paine by the Attorney General as the author of a profane and seditious work. Pending the trial, Paine was elected member of the National Convention for the department of Calais, and making his escape reached France in September 1792. On the trial of the ill

fated Louis XVI. Paine voted against the sentence of death; by so doing offended the Jacobins, was excluded from the Convention, arrested, and imprisoned in the Luxembourg. Immediately previous to his captivity he had concluded the first part of his work against revelation, entitled "The Age of Reason," and having confided it to the care of his friend Joel Barlow, it was published. By this step he forfeited the countenance of the majority of his American adherents. The fall of Robespierre released him from custody, and permitted him to publish, at Paris in 1795, the second part of his

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Age of Reason." Fearful of being captured by British cruisers, he remained in France till August 1802, when he embarked for America, and reached Baltimore the following October. His first wife he had lost the year following his marriage; from his second he had separated by mutual consent after a short union of three years and a half; the party whom he now selected to preside over his household arrangements was a Madame Bonneville, the wife of