Another fostered prejudice supposes "The Age of Reason" largely made up of scoffs. The Bishop of Llandaff, in his reply to Paine, was impressed by the elevated Theism of the work, to portions of which he ascribed "a philosophical sublimity." Watson apparently tried to constrain his ecclesiastical position into English fair play, so that his actual failures to do so were especially misleading, as many knew Paine only as represented by this eminent antagonist. For instance, the Bishop says, "Moses you term a coxcomb, etc." But Paine, commenting on Numbers xii., 3, "Moses was very meek, above all men," had argued that Moses could not have written the book, for "If Moses said this of himself he was a coxcomb." Again the Bishop says Paine terms Paul "a fool." But Paine had quoted from Paul, "'Thou fool, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die.' To which [he says] one might reply in his own language, and say, 'Thou fool, Paul, that which thou sowest is not quickened except it die not.'" No intellect that knows the law of literature, that deep answers only unto deep, can suppose that the effect of Paine's "Age of Reason," on which book the thirty years' war for religious freedom in England was won, after many martyrdoms, came from a scoffing or scurrilous work. It is never Paine's object to raise a laugh; if he does so it is because of the miserable baldness of the dogmas, and the ignorant literalism, consecrated in the popular mind of his time. Through page after page he peruses the Heavens, to him silently declaring the glory of God, and it is not laughter but awe when he asks, "From whence then could arise the solitary and strange conceit, that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependent on his protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple!" In another work Paine finds allegorical truth in the legend of Eden. The comparative mythlogists of to-day, with many sacred books of the East, can find mystical meaning and beauty in many legends of the Bible wherein Paine could see none, but it is because of their liberation by the rebels of last century from bondage to the pettiness of literalism. Paine sometimes exposes an absurdity with a taste easily questionable by a generation not required like his own to take such things under foot of the letter. But his spirit is never flippant, and the sentences that might so seem to a casual reader are such as Browning defended in his "Christmas Eve."