unconscious blasphemy of his supporters." Then Paine _did love his kind;_ he abhorred cruelty, and desired, after his fashion, to elevate his race. Examples of this are numerous. At the time when the "Common Sense" and "Crisis" were having an enormous sale, the demand for the former reaching not less than one hundred thousand copies, and both together offering to the author profits that would have made him rich, Paine freely gave the copyright to every State in the Union. In his period of public favor and of intimate friendship with the founders of the government, Paine declined to accept any place or office of emolument, saying: "I must be in everything, as I have ever been, a disinterested volunteer. My proper sphere of action is on the common floor of citizenship, and to honest men I give my hand and heart freely." The State of Virginia made a large claim on the general government for lands. Thomas Paine opposed the claim as unreasonable and unjust, though at that very time there was a resolution before the legislature of Virginia to appropriate to him a handsome sum of money for services rendered. In 1797, Paine was the chief promoter of the society of "Theophilanthropists," whose object was the extinction of religious prejudices, the maintenance of morality, and the diffusion of faith in one God. "It is want of feeling," says this _heartless blasphemer_, "to talk of priests and bells, while infants are perishing in hospitals, and the aged and infirm poor are dying in the streets." In 1774, Paine published in the _Pennsylvania Journal_, a strong, anti-slavery essay. While clerk in the Pennsylvania Legislature he made an appeal in behalf of the army, then in extreme distress, and subscribed his entire salary for the year to the fund that was raised. Towards the close of his life, he devised a plan for imposing a special tax on all deceased persons' estates, to create a fund from which all, on reaching twenty-one years, should receive a sum to establish them in business, and in order that all who were in the decline of life should be saved from destitution. It is not generally known that Paine often preached on Sunday afternoons at New Rochelle. In England he spoke in early life from Dissenting pulpits, and to him we owe this exquisite definition of religion: "It is man bringing to his Maker the fruits of his heart." All this is evidence that honorable considerations were at the bottom of his own belief. He was, according to his view, the friend of man, and in this interest wrote his books. He introduced kindness into religion.