Now, every religion has a birth, growth, culmination, and subsequent decay. It culminates in the production of some great man, who represents, and at the same time transcends, the causes which produced him, and who afterward abandons the religion which gave him birth. It has then fulfilled its work, and will eventually die. Jesus of Nazareth was the fulfillment of the Jewish religion; Luther, of the Catholic. The minor religions obey the same law. Unitarianism culminated in Theodore Parker; Quakerism, in Thomas Paine. At the culminating point, the typical child which is born, grows up, and comes out from or tramples upon the religion which produced him, and is called a "come-outer," a "protester," an "image-breaker," or an "infidel." But he has been produced by causes over which he had no control, and is the result for which they existed. With him the religion declines, and eventually will expire. The Quaker religion culminated on the 29th of January, 1737, in the little town of Thetford, and county of Norfolk, England, in the birth of Thomas Paine. Here Nature deserted her connection with the meeting, and took up her abode in the soul of the child. She has concentrated herein the democracy of centuries, and the special forces of a hundred years. The great principles of democracy have all been gathered here, and organized into a power which will move the world. Nature has also given a hardy physical constitution, without corruption of blood or bodily disease, and this health of body shall carry him safe through the three-score and ten, with a fraction of years to spare. Let us now follow the lines of his life.