It thus appears that in Paine's Theism the deity is made manifest, not by omnipotence, a word I do not remember in his theories, but in this correspondence of universal order and bounty with rçason and conscience, and the humane heart In later works this speculative side of his Theism presented a remarkable Zoroastrian variation. When pressed with Bishop Butler's terrible argument against previous Deism,--that the God of the Bible is no more cruel than the God of Nature,--Paine declared his preference for the Persian religion, which exonerated the deity from responsibility for natural evils, above the Hebrew which attributed such things to God. He was willing to sacrifice God's omnipotence to his humanity. He repudiates every notion of a devil, but was evidently unwilling to ascribe the unconquered realms of chaos to the divine Being in whom he believed. Thus, while theology was lowering Jesus to a mere King, glorying in baubles of crown and throne, pleased with adulation, and developing him into an authorizor of all the ills and agonies of the world, so depriving him of his humanity, Paine was recovering from the universe something like the religion of Jesus himself. "Why even of yourselves judge ye not what is right" In affirming the Religion of Humanity, Paine did not mean what Comte meant, a personification of the continuous life of our race*; nor did he merely mean benevolence towards all living creatures. * Paine's friend and fellow-prisoner, Anacharsis Clootz, was the first to describe Humanity as "L'Être Supreme." He affirmed a Religion based on the authentic divinity of that which is supreme in human nature and distinctive of it The sense of right, justice, love, mercy, is God himself in man; this spirit judges all things,--all alleged revelations, all gods. In affirming a deity too good, loving, just, to do what is ascribed to Jahve, Paine was animated by the same spirit that led the early believer to turn from heartless elemental gods to one born of woman, bearing in his breast a human heart. Pauline theology took away this human divinity, and effected a restoration, by making the Son of Man Jehovah, and commanding the heart back from its seat of judgment, where Jesus had set it. "Shall the clay say to the potter, why hast thou formed me thus?" "Yes," answered Paine, "if the thing felt itself hurt, and could speak." He knew as did Emerson, whom he often anticipates, that "no god dare wrong a worm."