"As to religion, I hold it to be the indispensable duty of all governments to protect all conscientious professors thereof, and I know of no other business which government hath to do therewith. Let a man throw aside that narrowness of soul, that selfishness of principle, which the niggards of all professions are so unwilling to part with, and he will be at once delivered of his fears on that head. Suspicion is the companion of mean souls, and the bane of all good society. For myself, I fully and conscientiously believe, that it is the will of the Almighty that there should be a diversity of religious opinions amongst us: it affords a larger field for our Christian kindness. Were we all of one way of thinking, our religious dispositions would want matter for probation; and, on this liberal principle, I look on the various denominations among us to be like children of the same family, differing only in what is called their Christian names." There was no pedantry whatever about Paine, this obedient son of Humanity. He would defend Man against men, against sects and parties; he would never quarrel about the botanical label of a tree bearing such fruits as the Declaration of Independence. But no man better knew the power of words, and that a botanical error may sometimes result in destructive treatment of the tree. For this reason he censured the Quakers for opposing the Revolution on the ground that, in the words of their testimony (1776), "the setting up and putting down kings and governments is God's peculiar prerogative." Kings, he answers, are not removed by miracles, but by just such means as the Americans were using. "Oliver Cromwell thanks you. Charles, then, died not by the hands of man; and should the present proud imitator of him come to the same untimely end, the writers and publishers of the Testimony are bound, by the doctrine it contains, to applaud the fact." He was then a Christian. In his "Epistle to Quakers" he speaks of the dispersion of the Jews as "foretold by our Saviour." In his famous first _Crisis_ he exhorts the Americans not to throw "the burden of the day upon Providence, but 'show your faith by your works,' that God may bless you." For in those days there was visible to such eyes as his, as to anti-slavery eyes in our civil war, "A fiery Gospel writ in burnished rows of steel." The Republic, not American but Human, became Paine's religion. "Divine Providence intends this country to be the asylum of persecuted virtue from every quarter of the globe." So he had written before the Declaration of Independence. In 1778 he finds that there still survives some obstructive superstition among English churchmen in America about the connection of Protestant Christianity with the King. In his seventh _Crisis_(November 21, 1778) he wrote sentences inspired by his new conception of religion.