The higher clergy, occupied with the old textual controversy, proudly instructing Paine in Hebrew or Greek idioms, little realized their ignorance in the matter now at issue. Their ignorance had been too carefully educated to even imagine the University in which words are things, and things the word, and the many graduations passed between Thetford Quaker meeting and the French Convention. What to scholastics, for whom humanities meant ancient classics, were the murders and massacres of primitive tribes, declared to be the word and work of God? Words, mere words. They never saw these things. But Paine had seen that war-god at his work. In childhood he had seen the hosts of the Defender of the Faith as, dripping with the blood of Culloden and Inverness, they marched through Thetford; in manhood he had seen the desolations wrought "by the grace of" that deity to the royal invader of America; he had seen the massacres ascribed to Jahve repeated in France, while Robespierre and Couthon were establishing worship of an infra-human deity. By sorrow, poverty, wrong, through long years, amid revolutions and death-agonies, the stay-maker's needle had been forged into a pen of lightning. No Oxonian conductor could avert that stroke, which was not at mere irrationalities, but at a huge idol worshipped with human sacrifices. The creation of the heart of Paine, historically traceable, is so wonderful, its outcome seems so supernatural, that in earlier ages he might have been invested with fable, like some Avatar. Of some such man, no doubt, the Hindu poets dreamed in their picture of young Arguna (in the _Bhagavatgita_). The warrior, borne to the battlefield in his chariot, finds arrayed against him his kinsmen, friends, preceptors. He bids his charioteer pause; he cannot fight those he loves. His charioteer turns: 't is the radiant face of divine Chrishna, his Saviour! Even He has led him to this grievous contention with kinsmen, and those to whose welfare he was devoted. Chrishna instructs his disciple that the war is an illusion; it is the conflict by which, from age to age, the divine life in the world is preserved. "This imperishable devotion I declared to the sun, the sun delivered it to Manu, Manu to Ikshâku; handed down from one to another it was studied by the royal sages. In the lapse of time that devotion was lost. It is even the same discipline which I this day communicate to thee, for thou art my servant and my friend. Both thou and I have passed through many births. Mine are known to me; thou knowest not of thine. I am made evident by my own power: as often as there is a decline of virtue, and an insurrection of wrong and injustice in the world, I appear."