The progress of mind is continuous. Strictly speaking, there are no periods of transition, no crises in thought. The history of ideas presents no gap. Every stage begins and ends an epoch. One is often reminded of the common notion that the year begins and ends at a particular moment. Every day begins and ends a year; every hour is equally sacred. Yet solemn thought, worship, self-examination, are precious, and these can be secured only by the observance of times and seasons; so that we fall on our knees and pray when the old year ends and the new one begins. So, as a point of time must be fixed upon, we will begin with Thomas Paine. It is not easy to speak fully and justly of Paine, because in so doing we must speak of the misapprehensions and mis-statements of which he has been the victim; and even if we refute these, the bare mention of them leaves a stain on his fame. No doubt his method--application of common-sense to religion--was essentially vicious. Common-sense is an admirable quality in practical affairs, quite indispensable in the management of business of all kinds, but it has no place in the discussion of works of the higher imagination--of poetry, art, music, or faith. But such was the man's genius, such was the demand of his age. It is easy to speak of his ignorance, his coarseness, his impudence, his vanity; but it must be remembered that his education was very imperfect, for he was utterly ignorant of any language but his own, and he did not, apparently, read even the English deists; that he was a man of the people; that he lived in an age of revolutions; that he stood for the rights of common humanity. It must be remembered also that, in the first place, he brought the human mind face to face with problems which had been appropriated by a special class that considered itself exempt from criticism. In the next place he was in dead earnest; not attacking the Bible or religion out of flippancy or brutality, but because he really hated the interpretations that were usually given of sacred things; his attack was against orthodoxy, not against faith. "His blasphemy," says Leslie Stephen, "was not against the Supreme God, but against Jehovah. He was vindicating the ruler of the universe from the imputations which believers in literal inspiration and dogmatical theology had heaped upon him under the disguise of homage. He was denying that the God before whom reasonable creatures should bow in reverence could be the supernatural tyrant of priestly imagination, who was responsible for Jewish massacres, who favored a petty clan at the expense of his other creatures, who punished the innocent for the guilty, who lighted the fires of everlasting torment for the masses of mankind, and who gave a monopoly of his favor to priests or a few favored enthusiasts. Paine, in short, with all his brutality, had the conscience of his hearers on his side, and we must prefer his rough exposure of popular errors to the