One hundred years before Paine's book, appeared Charles Blount's "Oracles of Reason." Macaulay describes Blount as the head of a small school of "infidels," troubled with a desire to make converts; his delight was to worry the priests by asking them how light existed before the sun was made, and where Eve found thread to stitch her fig-leaves. But to this same Blount, Macaulay is constrained to attribute emancipation of the press in England. Blount's title was taken up in America by Ethan Allen, leader of the "Green Mountain Boys." Allen's "Oracles of Reason" is forgotten; he is remembered by his demand (1775) for the surrender of Fort Ticonderoga, "in the name of Jehovah and the Continental Congress." The last five words of this famous demand would have been a better title for the book. It introduces the nation to a Jehovah qualified by the Continental Congress. Ethan Allen's deity is no longer a King of kings: arbitrariness has disappeared; men are summoned to belief in a governor administering laws inherent in the constitution of a universe co-eternal with himself, and with which he is interdependent. His administration is not for any divine glory, but, in anticipation of our constitutional preamble, to "promote the general welfare." The old Puritan alteration in the Lord's Prayer, "Thy Commonwealth come!" would in Allen's church have been "Thy Republic come!" That is, had he admitted prayer, which to an Executive is of course out of place. It must not, however, be supposed that Ethan Allen is conscious that his system is inspired by the Revolution. His book is a calm, philosophical analysis of New England theology and metaphysics; an attempt to clear away the ancient biblical science and set Newtonian science in its place; to found what he conceives "Natural Religion."