* In 1778 Lessing set forth his "New Hypothesis of the Evangelists," that they had independently built on a basis derived from some earlier Gospel of the Hebrews,--a theory now confirmed by the recovered fragments of that lost Memoir, collected by Dr. Nicholson of the Bodleian Library. It is tolerably certain that Paine was unacquainted with Lessing's work, when he became convinced, by variations in the accounts of the resurrection, that some earlier narrative "became afterwards the foundation of the four books ascribed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John,"--these being, traditionally eye-witnesses. Paine admits the power of the deity to make a revelation. He therefore deals with each of the more notable miracles on its own evidence, adhering to his plan of bringing the Bible to judge the Bible. Such an investigation, written with lucid style and quaint illustration, without one timid or uncandid sentence, coming from a man whose services and sacrifices for humanity were great, could not have failed to give the "Age of Reason" long life, even had these been its only qualities. Four years before the book appeared, Burke said in Parliament: "Who, born within the last forty years, has read one word of Collins, and Toland, and Tindal, and Chubb, and Morgan, and the whole race who call themselves freethinkers?" Paine was, in one sense, of this intellectual pedigree; and had his book been only a digest and expansion of previous negative criticisms, and a more thorough restatement of theism, these could have given it but a somewhat longer life; the "Age of Reason" must have swelled Burke's list of forgotten freethinking books. But there was an immortal soul in Paine's book. It is to the consideration of this its unique life, which has defied the darts of criticism for a century, and survived its own faults and limitations, that we now turn. II. Paine's book is the uprising of the human heart against the Religion of Inhumanity.